Previous research has shown that perceptual relations, social
affiliations, and geographical locations can be predicted using
distributional semantics. We investigated whether this extends
to chronological relations. In several computational studies
we demonstrated that the chronological order of days,
months, years, and the chronological sequence of historical
figures can be predicted using language statistics. In fact, both
the leaders of the Soviet Union and the presidents of the
United States can be ordered chronologically based on the cooccurrences
of their names in language. An experiment also
showed that the bigram frequency of US president names
predicted the response time of participants in their evaluation
of the chronology of these presidents. These findings are
explained by the Symbol Interdependency Hypothesis which
predicts that as a function of language use, language encodes
relations in the world around us. Language users can then use
language as a cognitive short-cut for mental representations