Alberti's letter counts

Alberti's letter counts

Four centuries before modern statistical linguistics was born, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) compared the frequency of vowels in Latin poems and orations, making the first quantified observation of a stylistic difference ever. Using a corpus of 20 Latin texts (over 5 million letters), Alberti’s observations are statistically assessed. Letter counts prove that poets used significantly more a...

Case-sensitive letter and bigram frequency counts from large-scale English corpora.

We tabulated upper- and lowercase letter frequency using several large-scale English corpora (approximately 183 million words in total). The results indicate that the relative frequencies for upper- and lowercase letters are not equivalent. We report a letter-naming experiment in which uppercase frequency predicted response time to uppercase letters better than did lowercase frequency. Tables o...

Editorial Letter:

Letter dyslexia in a letter-by-letter reader.

We describe a letter-by-letter patient who produced misreading errors in both letters in isolation and in words. All errors were visual in nature. We hypothesized an access deficit to the abstract visual representation of letters that prevents letter identification. This deficit could account for the patient's letter-by-letter behavior, since each letter constituted a potential identification p...

Chirality counts?

Baclofen is the P-chlorophenyl derivative of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) derivative with an antispasmodic action and is used as a central acting muscle relaxant. GABA is a suppressive neurotransmitter widely distributed in the peripheral and central nervous systems (1). Baclofen [3-(p-Chlorophenyl)4-aminobutanoic acid], is a GABA B agonist. Baclofen has both presynaptic and post synaptic act...