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Small, awkward moments. Big, unfounded linguistic theories.

Sean Roberts
22 posts

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October 5, 2011
12:18 PM
243 views

Cultural differences in lateral transmission: Phylogenetic trees are OK for Linguistics but not biology

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

An article in PLos ONE debunks the myth that hunter-gatherer societies borrow more words than agriculturalist societies. Evidence for low rates of horizontal transmission means that "linguistic data are superior to genetic data for reconstructing human prehistory".... Read more »

Claire Bowern, Patience Epps, Russell Gray, Jane Hill, Keith Hunley, Patrick McConvell, Jason Zentz. (2011) Does Lateral Transmission Obscure Inheritance in Hunter-Gatherer Languages?. PLoS ONE, 6(9). info:/doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025195

June 14, 2011
04:50 PM
522 views

Categorising languages through network modularity

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Today I've been learning more about network structure (from Cris Moore) and I've applied my poor understanding and overconfidence to find language families from etymology data! The analysis suggests a split between Germanic and Romance languages.... Read more »

Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore, & M. E. J. Newman. (2008) Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks. Nature 453, 98 - 101 (2008). arXiv: 0811.0484v1

May 18, 2011
01:00 PM
628 views

The end of Universals?

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Dunn et al. (2011) has come in for a lot of flack, but are the differences in dependencies between language families really all that different?... Read more »

Michael Dunn,, Simon J. Greenhill,, Stephen C. Levinson, & . (2011) Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature, 79-82. info:/

March 18, 2011
01:17 PM
601 views

Cultural inheritance in studies of artifical grammar learning

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Recently, I've been attending an artificial language learning research group and have discovered an interesting case of cultural inheritance.... Read more »

A. Reber. (1967) Implicit learning of artifical grammars. Journal of Verbal Learning and Behavior, 855-863. info:/

November 19, 2010
01:04 PM
308 views

Learning the Form of Causal Relationships Using Hierarchical Bayesian Models

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Lucas & Griffiths present a hierarchical Bayesian model of causal structure learning, and show that it predicts the performance of adults and children better than the Power PC model and the delta P model... Read more »

Lucas, C. G., & Griffiths, T. (2010) Learning the Form of Causal Relationships Using Hierarchical Bayesian Models. Cognitive Science, 34(1). info:/

August 24, 2010
07:35 AM
826 views

Perceptual Warping of Colour

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

There is evidence that categorisations can influence perception, which has been identified as a crucial argument for Relativism. In this post, the idea of perceptual warping is explained and applied to colour categorisation.... Read more »

DEBOER, B. (2000) Self-organization in vowel systems. Journal of Phonetics, 28(4), 441-465. DOI: 10.1006/jpho.2000.0125

Goldstone, R. (1994) Influences of categorization on perceptual discrimination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123(2), 178-200. DOI: 10.1037//0096-3445.123.2.178

Kuhl, P. (1994) Learning and representation in speech and language. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 4(6), 812-822. DOI: 10.1016/0959-4388(94)90128-7

Miyawaki, K., Strange, W., Verbrugge, R. R., Liberman, A. M., Jenkins, J. J., & Fujimura, O. (1975) An effect of linguistic experience: The discrimination of (r) and (l) by native speakers of Japanese and English . Perception and Psychophysics, 331-340. info:/

KUHL, P. (1983) Perception of auditory equivalence classes for speech in early infancy. Infant Behavior and Development, 6(2-3), 263-285. DOI: 10.1016/S0163-6383(83)80036-8

Lupyan G. (2008) From chair to "chair": a representational shift account of object labeling effects on memory. Journal of experimental psychology. General, 137(2), 348-69. PMID: 18473663

Buchsbaum, G. (2002) Color categories revealed by non-negative matrix factorization of Munsell color spectra. Vision Research, 42(5), 559-563. DOI: 10.1016/S0042-6989(01)00303-0

Connell, L., & Lynott, D. (2009) Is a bear white in the woods? Parallel representation of implied object color during language comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin , 16(3), 573-577. DOI: 10.3758/PBR.16.3.573

June 24, 2010
02:09 PM
381 views

Cultural Induction is Hard

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Chater and Christiansen (2010) argue that learning culturally transmitted systems such as language are easy to learn because they have adapted to learner's biases, so their intuitions will likely be correct. I argue against this using grammaticality judgements of Welsh.... Read more »

Nick Chater . (2010) Language Acquisition Meets Language Evolution. Cognitive Science. info:/

May 25, 2010
08:26 AM
304 views

Evolutionary approaches to Bilingualism

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Video of a talk on Language Evolution and Bilingualism from the University Of Edinburgh's LEL Postgraduate Conference... Read more »

Frank MC, Goodman ND, & Tenenbaum JB. (2009) Using speakers' referential intentions to model early cross-situational word learning. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20(5), 578-85. PMID: 19389131

Hunag, Y. (2009) Supporting Meaningful Social Networks. Technical Report, ECS, University of Southampton. info:/

Byers-Heinlein K, & Werker JF. (2009) Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: infants' language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristic. Developmental science, 12(5), 815-23. PMID: 19702772

May 13, 2010
05:34 PM
282 views

E-coli, Linux and Language

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

How do language structures compare to structures of Bacteria and Operating Systems?... Read more »

Yan, K., Fang, G., Bhardwaj, N., Alexander, R., & Gerstein, M. (2010) Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914771107

May 11, 2010
09:33 AM
471 views

Mutual Exclusivity Biases in Cross-situational Learning

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Frank et al. (2009)'s model of Child word acquisition is applied to a bilingual corpus.... Read more »

Frank MC, Goodman ND, & Tenenbaum JB. (2009) Using speakers' referential intentions to model early cross-situational word learning. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20(5), 578-85. PMID: 19389131

Byers-Heinlein K, & Werker JF. (2009) Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: infants' language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristic. Developmental science, 12(5), 815-23. PMID: 19702772

Deák GO, Yen L, & Pettit J. (2001) By any other name: when will preschoolers produce several labels for a referent?. Journal of child language, 28(3), 787-804. PMID: 11797548

Frank, I., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2002) Young monolingual and bilingual children's responses to violation of the Mutual Exclusivity Principle. International Journal of Bilingualism, 6(2), 125-146. DOI: 10.1177/13670069020060020201

Markman EM, & Wachtel GF. (1988) Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words. Cognitive psychology, 20(2), 121-57. PMID: 3365937

Merriman WE, & Bowman LL. (1989) The mutual exclusivity bias in children's word learning. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 54(3-4), 1-132. PMID: 2608077

Merriman WE, Marazita J, & Jarvis LH. (1993) Four-year-olds' disambiguation of action and object word reference. Journal of experimental child psychology, 56(3), 412-30. PMID: 8301246

Healey, E. and Scarabela, B. (2009) Are children willing to accept two labels for one object?. Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar. University of Reading. info:/

May 6, 2010
07:00 AM
273 views

Systematicity of RNA

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

I've been looking at evolutionary precursors to bilingualism. What does this mean? At the moment, I'm thinking about it in the sense of having two or more signals which correspond to the same action or meaning. Not much before language, you say? How about going all the way back to RNA codes?RNA converts genetic information stored in DNA into proteins which regulate processes within cells. The ‘code’ for translating DNA into proteins is redundant but not ambiguous. There are varieties of code. Different organisms use different proportions of codons. ‘Error’ is defined as sum of protein changes when changing from each codon to each other codon, weighted by the frequency of the codon’s use (Marquez, Smit & Knight, 2005). In this sense, the error rate is comparable with the RegMap index of redundancy.RegMap was developed to calculate the degree of regularity in the mappings between signals and meanings (Tamariz & Smith, 2008). Essentially, it's the relative entropy modified by the frequency of use.RegMap was applied to RNA coding frequencies of various organisms. Info was taken from the codon usage database for about 16,500 organisms. As a baseline, the same coding transcriptions were used, but with randomised frequencies. The RegMap index of genetic code and actual usage frequencies is significantly higher than randomised frequencies (Mean RegMap for actual = 0.711, random = 0.708, t = 4.8, df = 7196, p The graph is not much use, but here it is:Marquez R, Smit S, & Knight R (2005). Do universal codon-usage patterns minimize the effects of mutation and translation error? Genome biology, 6 (11) PMID: 16277746Monica Tamariz, Andrew D. M. Smith (2008). Quantifying the regularity of the mappings between signals and meanings Proceedings of the 7th Conference on the Evolution of Language. pdf... Read more »

Marquez R, Smit S, & Knight R. (2005) Do universal codon-usage patterns minimize the effects of mutation and translation error?. Genome biology, 6(11). PMID: 16277746

Monica Tamariz, Andrew D. M. Smith. (2008) Quantifying the regularity of the mappings between signals and meanings. Proceedings of the 7th Conference on the Evolution of Language. info:/

May 4, 2010
10:58 AM
294 views

Bilingualism as a Preadaptation for Language

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

A comparative approach to bilingualism. Bilingualism is difficult to define, but by asking whether there is evidence for this capacity in non-human species, it's hoped that this question is made clearer.... Read more »

Bialystok E, & Martin MM. (2004) Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: evidence from the dimensional change card sort task. Developmental science, 7(3), 325-39. PMID: 15595373

D. Demolin. (2010) Prosody and recursion in primate vocalisation. Proceed- ings of the JAIST International Seminar on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication, Kyoto, Japan. info:/

Doupe AJ, & Kuhl PK. (1999) Birdsong and human speech: common themes and mechanisms. Annual review of neuroscience, 567-631. PMID: 10202549

Fitch, W. T. (2005) The evolution of language: A comparative review. Biology and Philosophy, 20(2-3), 193-203. info:/10.1007/s10539-005-5597-1

Kaminski J, Call J, & Fischer J. (2004) Word learning in a domestic dog: evidence for "fast mapping". Science (New York, N.Y.), 304(5677), 1682-3. PMID: 15192233

Kuhl, P. . (1978) Speech perception by the chinchilla: Identification functions for synthetic VOT stimuli. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 63(3), 905. DOI: 10.1121/1.381770

Magrath, R., Pitcher, B., & Gardner, J. (2009) An avian eavesdropping network: alarm signal reliability and heterospecific response. Behavioral Ecology, 20(4), 745-752. DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arp055

Oda, R. and Masataka, N. (1996) Interspecific responses of ring-tailed lemurs to playback of antipredator alarm calls given by Verreaux's sifakas. Ethology, 441-453. info:/10.1159/000021651

SCOTT-PHILLIPS, T. (2008) Defining biological communication. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 21(2), 387-395. DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01497.x

SEYFARTH, R., & CHENEY, D. (1990) The assessment by vervet monkeys of their own and another species' alarm calls. Animal Behaviour, 40(4), 754-764. DOI: 10.1016/S0003-3472(05)80704-3

Soma, M., Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, M., & Okanoya, K. (2009) Song-learning strategies in the Bengalese finch: do chicks choose tutors based on song complexity?. Animal Behaviour, 78(5), 1107-1113. DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.08.002

Zuberbühler, K. (2000) Interspecies semantic communication in two forest primates. Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 267(1444), 713-718. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2000.1061

April 26, 2010
04:15 PM
325 views

Keeping Time

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

A theory of the Evolution of Language from singing to keep time.... Read more »

Isbell, L. A., & Young T. P. (1996) The evolution of bipedalism in hominids and reduced group size in chimpanzees: alternative responses to decreasing resource availability. Journal of Human Evolution, 30(5), 389-397. DOI: 10.1006/jhev.1996.0034

April 1, 2010
12:12 PM
469 views

Cultural Variation and Social Networks

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

The amount of linguistic variance in a country is predicted by network statistics of Twitter.... Read more »

Lupyan G, & Dale R. (2010) Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PloS one, 5(1). PMID: 20098492

Kirby S, Dowman M, & Griffiths TL. (2007) Innateness and culture in the evolution of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(12), 5241-5. PMID: 17360393

February 9, 2010
06:50 AM
492 views

How many words for Red?

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

The distribution of colour terms on Wikipedia correlates with the human Just Noticable Difference Curve.... Read more »

Long F, Yang Z, & Purves D. (2006) Spectral statistics in natural scenes predict hue, saturation, and brightness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(15), 6013-8. PMID: 16595630

January 26, 2010
04:00 AM
381 views

Evolutionary Linguists announce arrival of Skynet

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

In a recent book chapter, Loreto, Baronchelli & Puglisi (2010) summarise mathematical models of language games. They minimally define a system which will allow agents to reach shared linguistic categories which describe continuous stimuli (e.g. colour). New findings include a demonstration that the number of linguistic categories will stay low, regardless of the resolution of the agents' 'eyes'. However, I was particularly struck by the last paragraph, which appears to be ominously more 60s science-fiction than the mathematical jargon:"Finally it is important to mention that in the last few years a potentially very interesting experimental platform appeared: the World Wide Web. Though only a few years old, the growth of the Web and its effect on the society have been astonishing ..."What is this wondrous thing called the World Wide Web? Why has nobody told me about it? Yes, as far as I can tell, this was published last month. Then, the really spooky Skynet stuff:"Innovation has widened the possibilities for communication. Social media like blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking tools allow the immediacy of conversation, with unprecedented levels of communication speed and community size. In this perspective the web is acquiring the status of a platform for social computing, able to coordinate and exploit the cognitive abilities of the users for a given task."We are enslaved by this terrible self-organising system! But what task is it trying to complete? Surely nothing good. It seems that Evolutionary Linguists just can't help imagining dystopian futures.Vittorio Loreto;, Andrea Baronchelli;, & Andrea Puglisi (2009). Mathematical Modeling of Language Games Evolution of Communication and Language in Embodied Agents, 263-281... Read more »

Vittorio Loreto;, Andrea Baronchelli;, & Andrea Puglisi. (2009) Mathematical Modeling of Language Games. Evolution of Communication and Language in Embodied Agents, 263-281. info:/

January 25, 2010
08:24 AM
413 views

Language Structure and Social Structure

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Lupyan & Dale's recent article shows that social structure (e.g. population size) affects linguistic change. But can this dynamic be extended back in time to help think about the evolution of language?... Read more »

Lupyan G, Dale R. (2010) Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure. PLoS ONE, 5(1). info:/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559

Honda, E., & Okanoya, K. (1999) Acoustical and Syntactical Comparisons between Songs of the White-backed Munia (Lonchura striata) and Its Domesticated Strain, the Bengalese Finch (Lonchura striata var. domestica). Zoological Science, 16(2), 319-326. DOI: 10.2108/zsj.16.319

Isbell, L. (1996) The evolution of bipedalism in hominids and reduced group size in chimpanzees: alternative responses to decreasing resource availability. Journal of Human Evolution, 30(5), 389-397. DOI: 10.1006/jhev.1996.0034

January 11, 2010
09:59 AM
626 views

Summary: Grassman & Tomasello (2010)

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Grassman & Tomasello (2010) question the findings of Jaswal & Hansen (2006), arguing that children primarily use pragmatic cues over linguistic conventions when trying to resolve ambiguities.... Read more »

Jaswal VK, & Hansen MB. (2006) Learning words: children disregard some pragmatic information that conflicts with mutual exclusivity. Developmental science, 9(2), 158-65. PMID: 16472316

Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010) Young children follow pointing over words in interpreting acts of reference. Developmental Science, 13(1), 252-263. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00871.x

January 11, 2010
09:46 AM
652 views

Mutual Exclusivity Diagrams

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Some diagrams of experiments into the Mutual Exclusivity bias in children's word learning.... Read more »

Au TK, & Glusman M. (1990) The principle of mutual exclusivity in word learning: to honor or not to honor?. Child development, 61(5), 1474-90. PMID: 2245739

Byers-Heinlein, K., & Werker, J. (2009) Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: infants' language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristic. Developmental Science, 12(5), 815-823. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00902.x

Jaswal VK, & Hansen MB. (2006) Learning words: children disregard some pragmatic information that conflicts with mutual exclusivity. Developmental science, 9(2), 158-65. PMID: 16472316

Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010) Young children follow pointing over words in interpreting acts of reference. Developmental Science, 13(1), 252-263. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00871.x

Healey, E. and Scarabela, B. (2009) Are children willing to accept two labels for one object?. Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar. University of Reading. info:/

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