Entropy 2010, 12, 327-337; doi:10.3390/e12030327 entropy ISSN 1099-4300 www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy Article Comparative Analysis of Networks of Phonologically Similar Words in English and Spanish Samuel Arbesman 1 , Steven H. Strogatz 2 and Michael S. Vitevitch 3, * 1 Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, 180 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA; E-Mail: arbesman@gmail.com 2 223 Kimball Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA; E-Mail: shs7@cornell.edu 3 Department of Psychology, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: mvitevit@ku.edu. Received: 4 December 2009; in revised form: 16 February 2010 / Accepted: 21 February 2010 / Published: 2 March 2010 Abstract: Previous network analyses of several languages revealed a unique set of structural characteristics. One of these characteristics—the presence of many smaller components (referred to as islands)—was further examined with a comparative analysis of the island constituents. The results showed that Spanish words in the islands tended to be phonologically and semantically similar to each other, but English words in the islands tended only to be phonologically similar to each other. The results of this analysis yielded hypotheses about language processing that can be tested with psycholinguistic experiments, and offer insight into cross-language differences in processing that have been previously observed. Keywords: language network; comparative analysis; English; Spanish 1. Introduction Network analysis has been used to examine various aspects of language. With words constituting the vertices of a network, edges have been placed between vertices if the words are semantically related (i.e., similar meanings) [1–5] or syntactically related [6–8]. Previous network analyses have also examined the structure that exists among words that are related in terms of their orthography (i.e., how the words are spelled) or phonology (i.e., how the words are pronounced) [9–11]. Using a metric OPEN ACCESS