71 posts · 42,693 views
The Adventures of Auck
22 posts
A Replicated Typo 2.0
49 posts
Sort by Latest Post, Most Popular
View by Condensed, Full
- January 3, 2012
- 07:09 AM
- 85 views
Social structure and language evolution: resolving the synthetic/analytic debate
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
How does social structure affect the way we think about the evolution of language?... Read more »
Kirby, S., Dowman, M., & Griffiths, T. (2007) Innateness and culture in the evolution of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(12), 5241-5245. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0608222104
Scott-Phillips, T., & Kirby, S. (2010) Language evolution in the laboratory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(9), 411-417. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.006
Sorace, Antonella. (2011) Pinning down the concept of "interface" in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(33). info:/
- December 14, 2011
- 07:48 AM
- 468 views
The power of diversity: New Scientist recognises the growing work on social structure and linguistic structure
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
A feature article in last week’s New Scientist asks why there is so much linguistic diversity present in the world, and what are the forces that drive it. The article reads like a who’s who of the growing field of language structure and social structure. This is practically as close as my subject will come to having a pull-out section in Vanity Fair. Furthermore, it recognises the weakening grip of Chomskyan linguistics.... Read more »
David Robson. (2011) Power of Babel: Why one language isn't enough . New Scientist. info:/
- November 30, 2011
- 09:06 AM
- 197 views
Spurious correlation bonanza to mark Replicated Typo 2.0 reaching 100,000 hits
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
As we’ve shown on this blog, culturally transmitted features can be highly correlated with each other. This fact is a source of both frustration and fascination, so I’ve roped together some of my favourite investigations of cultural correlations into a correlation super-chain. Let Replicated Typo take you on trip from acacia trees to traffic accidents…... Read more »
Way, B., & Lieberman, M. (2010) Is there a genetic contribution to cultural differences? Collectivism, individualism and genetic markers of social sensitivity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(2-3), 203-211. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsq059
Atkinson QD. (2011) Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science (New York, N.Y.), 332(6027), 346-9. PMID: 21493858
EMBER, C., & EMBER, M. (2007) Climate, Econiche, and Sexuality: Influences on Sonority in Language. American Anthropologist, 109(1), 180-185. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2007.109.1.180
Lupan, G. . (2009) Language structure is partly determined by social structure. Social and Linguistic Structure. info:/
Nettle, D. (1998) Explaining Global Patterns of Language Diversity. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 17(4), 354-374. DOI: 10.1006/jaar.1998.0328
Barone, T. (2000) Is the siesta an adaptation to disease?. Human Nature, 11(3), 233-258. DOI: 10.1007/s12110-000-1012-4
- October 5, 2011
- 12:18 PM
- 238 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
- October 5, 2011
- 12:14 PM
- 154 views
Cultural differences in lateral transmission: Phylogenetic trees are OK for Linguistics but not biology
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Tweet
The three areas under analysis
An article in PLos ONE debunks the myth that hunter-gatherer societies borrow more words than agriculturalist societies. In doing so, it suggests that horizontal transmission is low enough for phylogenetic analyses to be a valid linguistic tool.
Lexicons from around 20% of the extant languages spoken by hunter-gatherer societies were coded for . . . → Read More: Cultural differences in lateral transmission: Phylogenetic trees are OK fo........ 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
- September 11, 2011
- 01:06 PM
- 397 views
Compositionality and Bilingualism
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Languages evolve over time under a pressure to be learned by a new generation. Does learning two languages at once effect this pressure? My experiment says ... maybe.... Read more »
Kirby, S., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2008) Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(31), 10681-10686. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707835105
- September 8, 2011
- 09:01 AM
- 481 views
The Language Evolution Tree: Yet more evidence
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
More evidence that acacia trees had a role to play in the evolution of langauge.... Read more »
Sean Geraint. (2011) Language Evolution and the Acacia Tree. Speculative Grammarian, Vol CLXII(4). info:/
- August 29, 2011
- 12:08 PM
- 588 views
A spin glass model of cultural consensus
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Does your social network determine your rational rationality? When trying to co-ordinate with a number of other people on a cultural feature, the locally rational thing to do is to go with the majority. However, in certain situations it might make sense to choose the minority feature. This means that learning multiple features might be rational in some situations, even if there is a pressure against redundancy. ... Read more »
ITOH, Y., & UEDA, S. (2004) The Ising model for changes in word ordering rules in natural languages. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 198(3-4), 333-339. DOI: 10.1016/j.physd.2004.09.006
STAUFFER, D., CASTELLO, X., EGUILUZ, V., & SANMIGUEL, M. (2007) Microscopic Abrams–Strogatz model of language competition. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 374(2), 835-842. DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2006.07.036
Castelló, X., Loureiro, L., Eguíluz , V. M., & San Miguel, M. (2007) The fate of bilingualism in a model of language competition. Advancing Social Simulation: The First World Congress, 83-94. info:/
- August 24, 2011
- 04:56 AM
- 516 views
Language Evolves in R, not Python: An appology
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
One of the risks of blogging is that you can fire off ideas into the public domain while you’re still excited about them and haven’t really tested them all that well. Last month I blogged about a random walk model of linguistic complexity. This week, I found out that it was flawed...... Read more »
Lupyan G, & Dale R. (2010) Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PloS one, 5(1). PMID: 20098492
- August 6, 2011
- 06:42 AM
- 573 views
Cultural Evolution and the Impending Singularity: The Movie
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
A video of a talk I gave at the Santa Fe Institute, asking questions like "Has Biological Evolution come to an end?", "Is belief an emergent property?", "Will advanced computers use humans as batteries?" and "Will robots spend more time playing the violin than solving science?"... Read more »
Sperl, M., Chang, A., Weber, N., & Hübler, A. (1999) Hebbian learning in the agglomeration of conducting particles. Physical Review E, 59(3), 3165-3168. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.59.3165
Chater N, & Christiansen MH. (2010) Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive science, 34(7), 1131-57. PMID: 21564247
Ay N, Flack J, & Krakauer DC. (2007) Robustness and complexity co-constructed in multimodal signalling networks. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 362(1479), 441-7. PMID: 17255020
Guttal V, & Couzin ID. (2010) Social interactions, information use, and the evolution of collective migration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(37), 16172-7. PMID: 20713700
- August 4, 2011
- 03:42 AM
- 642 views
The Bilingual paradox in Language Evolution: Top down versus bottom up approaches
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Children are adept at learning more than one language at a time and there are many bilingual societies in the world. However, pressures on memory and redundancy makes it unclear what the adaptive advantage of a cognitive capacity for learning multiple languages at an early stage of language evolution would be. How can we account for the evolution of this ability? Would an early population of language users most likely be monolingual or bilingual?... Read more »
David Burkett,, & Tom Griffiths. (2010) Iterated Learning of Multiple Languaged from Multiple Teachers. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of EvoLang 2010. info:/
- August 1, 2011
- 11:17 AM
- 527 views
Sonority and Sex: Why smaller communities are louder
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Ember & Ember show that the degree of sonority in a language is related to the frequency of extramarital sex in its community. Could this be linked to why smaller communities have a smaller phoneme inventory?... Read more »
EMBER, C., & EMBER, M. (2007) Climate, Econiche, and Sexuality: Influences on Sonority in Language. American Anthropologist, 109(1), 180-185. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2007.109.1.180
MUNROE, R., & FOUGHT, J. (2007) Response to Ember and Ember's “Climate, Econiche, and Sexuality: Influences on Sonority in Language”. American Anthropologist, 109(4), 784-785. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2007.109.4.784
- July 21, 2011
- 10:17 AM
- 459 views
Linguistic diversity and traffic accidents
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Daniel Nettle's model of linguistic diversity which showed that linguistic variation tends to decline even with a small amount of migration between communities. I wondered if statistics about population movement would correlate with linguistic diversity. I found that number of traffic fatalities are a pretty good predictor. What's going on?... Read more »
Atkinson QD. (2011) Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science (New York, N.Y.), 332(6027), 346-9. PMID: 21493858
- June 26, 2011
- 04:50 PM
- 685 views
A random walk model of linguistic complexity
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Large-scale statistical analyses of linguistic typologies (e.g. Lupyan & Dale, 2010) have poor temporal resolution. A correlation between two variables that exists now may be an accident of more complex dynamics. I discuss a random walk model that tries to estimate the probability that a current correlation is dynamically unstable.... Read more »
Lupyan G, & Dale R. (2010) Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PloS one, 5(1). PMID: 20098492
Hay, J., & Bauer, L. (2007) Phoneme inventory size and population size. Language, 83(2), 388-400. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2007.0071
Atkinson QD. (2011) Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. Science (New York, N.Y.), 332(6027), 346-9. PMID: 21493858
- June 21, 2011
- 09:25 PM
- 599 views
Linguistic interactions in the UK
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Ratti et al. (2010) take data from 12 billion telephone calls made over the space of a month and estimate regions of human interaction. The map seems to correlate with regional accent.... Read more »
Ratti, Carlo, Sobolevsky, Stanislav, Calabrese, Francesco, Andris, Clio, Reades, Jonathan, Martino, Mauro, Claxton, Rob, & Strogatz, Steven H. (2010) Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interaction. PLoS ONE. info:/
- June 18, 2011
- 05:55 PM
- 630 views
Creative cultural transmission as chaotic sampling
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Chaos has been used to create variations on musical and dance sequences (Dabby, 2008; Bradley & Stuart, 1998). Here, I apply this to birdsong. It could also be used to model the evolution of creative cultural features.... Read more »
Dabby, D. (2008) MUSIC THEORY: Creating Musical Variation. Science, 320(5872), 62-63. DOI: 10.1126/science.1153825
Bradley E, & Stuart J. (1998) Using chaos to generate variations on movement sequences. Chaos (Woodbury, N.Y.), 8(4), 800-807. PMID: 12779786
Spencer, K., Wimpenny, J., Buchanan, K., Lovell, P., Goldsmith, A., & Catchpole, C. (2005) Developmental stress affects the attractiveness of male song and female choice in the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata). Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 58(4), 423-428. DOI: 10.1007/s00265-005-0927-5
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
Kiebel SJ, Daunizeau J, & Friston KJ. (2008) A hierarchy of time-scales and the brain. PLoS computational biology, 4(11). PMID: 19008936
Hosino, T., & Okanoya, K. (2000) Lesion of a higher-order song nucleus disrupts phrase level complexity in Bengalese finches. NeuroReport, 11(10), 2091-2095. DOI: 10.1097/00001756-200007140-00007
- June 15, 2011
- 12:15 AM
- 676 views
Cultural Evolution and the Impending Singularity
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Prof. Alfred Hulber is an actual mad professor who is a danger to life as we know it. In a talk this evening he went from ball bearings in castor oil to hyper-advanced machine intelligence. However, will hyper-intelligent machines actually give us a better scientific understanding of the universe, or will they just spend their time playing tetris?... Read more »
Sperl, M., Chang, A., Weber, N., & Hübler, A. (1999) Hebbian learning in the agglomeration of conducting particles. Physical Review E, 59(3), 3165-3168. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.59.3165
Bettencourt LM, Lobo J, Helbing D, Kühnert C, & West GB. (2007) Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(17), 7301-6. PMID: 17438298
West, G. (1997) A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology. Science, 276(5309), 122-126. DOI: 10.1126/science.276.5309.122
Chater N, & Christiansen MH. (2010) Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive science, 34(7), 1131-57. PMID: 21564247
- June 14, 2011
- 04:50 PM
- 513 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
- June 14, 2011
- 04:50 PM
- 542 views
Categorising languages through network modularity
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
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
- June 14, 2011
- 12:15 AM
- 504 views
Academic Networking
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Who are the movers and shakers in your field? You can use social network theory on your bibliographies to find out ...... Read more »
SAID, Y., WEGMAN, E., SHARABATI, W., & RIGSBY, J. (2008) Social networks of author–coauthor relationships. Computational Statistics , 52(4), 2177-2184. DOI: 10.1016/j.csda.2007.07.021
Newman, M. (2001) From the Cover: The structure of scientific collaboration networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 404-409. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.021544898
topics
join us!
Do you write about peer-reviewed research in your blog? Use ResearchBlogging.org to make it easy for your readers — and others from around the world — to find your serious posts about academic research.
If you don't have a blog, you can still use our site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.
