Short-Term Memory Capacity across Time and Language Estimated from Ancient and Modern Literary Texts. Study-Case: New Testament Translations

Abstract

We study the short-term memory capacity of ancient readers of the original New Testament written in Greek, of its translations to Latin and to modern languages. To model it, we consider the number of words between any two contiguous interpunctions I p , because this parameter can model how the human mind memorizes "chunks" of information. Since I P can be calculated for any alphabetical text, we can perform experiments-otherwise impossiblewith ancient readers by studying the literary works they used to read. The "experiments" compare the I P of texts of a language/translation to those of another language/translation by measuring the minimum average probability of finding joint readers (those who can read both texts because of similar short-term memory capacity) and by defining an "overlap index". We also define the population of universal readers, people who can read any New Testament text in any language. Future work is vast, with many research tracks, because alphabetical literatures are very large and allow many experiments, such as comparing authors, translations or even texts written by artificial intelligence tools.

Is Short-Term Memory Made of Two Processing Units? Clues from Italian and English Literatures down Several Centuries

“…To model a two-unit STM processing, we further develop our previous studies based on a parameter called the "word interval", indicated by I p , given by the number of words between any two contiguous interpunctions [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. The term "interval" arises by noting that I p does measure an "interval"-expressed in words-which can be transformed into time through a reading speed [9], as shown in [1].…”

“…The presence of interpunctions in a sentence and its length in words are, very likely, the tangible consequence of two consecutive processing units necessary to deliver the meaning of the sentence, the first of which we have already studied with regard to I p and the linguistic I-channel [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8].…”

“…When we start reading a sentence, the mind tries to predict its full meaning from what it has already read, and only when an in-sentence interpunction is found (i.e., comma, colon, semicolon), it can partially understand the text, whose full meaning is finally revealed when a final interpunction (question mark, exclamation mark, full-stop) is found. This first processing, therefore, is revealed by I p , the second processing is revealed by P F and by the number of word intervals I ′ P s contained in the sentence, the latter indicated by M F [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. The longer a sentence is, with many clauses, the longer the ideas remain deferred until the mind can establish its meaning from all its words, resulting in the text being less readable.…”

“…The stochastic variables I P , P F , M F , and the number of characters per word, C P , are loosely termed deep-language variables in this paper, following our general statistical theory on alphabetical languages and their linguistic channels, developed in a series of papers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. These parameters refer, of course, to the "surface" structure of texts, not to the "deep" structure mentioned in cognitive theory.…”

“…Let us consider a literary work (e.g., a novel) and its subdivision in disjoint blocks of text long enough to give reliable average values, such as chapters, as we have done in References [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Let n S be the number of sentences contained in a text block, n W the number of words contained in the n S sentences, n C the number of characters contained in the n w words and n I the number of punctuation marks (interpunctions) contained in the n S sentences.…”