92 posts · 65,604 views
A blog (mostly) dedicated to language, its evolution and anything else in-between.
Wintz
21 posts
Sean Roberts
49 posts
Hannah Little
0 posts
Michael
10 posts
Richard Littauer
0 posts
Kevin
1 post
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- January 25, 2012
- 09:24 PM
- 108 views
The Great Mystery of Vanishing Phonemes
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
It’s been well over a year since I first wrote about the relationship between phoneme inventory size and demography (see here and here). Since then, I have completed a thesis examining this relationship further, especially in the context of the relative roles of demography and tradeoffs between other linguistic subsystems (namely, a language’s lexicon and [...]... Read more »
Atkinson, Q. (2011) Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Science, 332(6027), 346-349. DOI: 10.1126/science.1199295
- January 3, 2012
- 07:09 AM
- 86 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
- 526 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
- 202 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
- November 25, 2011
- 11:33 AM
- 296 views
Reconstructing linguistic phylogenies – a tautology?
by Kevin in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Tweet So I thought I should begin my first post on here with a nice and gentle introductory sentence, but I realise that pointing out the increased use of computational phylogenetic tools on cultural and particularly linguistic data to the avid readers of this blog is probably a pretty pointless exercise. There is of course [...]... Read more »
Atkinson, Q., Meade, A., Venditti, C., Greenhill, S., & Pagel, M. (2008) Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts. Science, 319(5863), 588-588. DOI: 10.1126/science.1149683
Croft, W. (2008) Evolutionary Linguistics. Annual Review of Anthropology, 37(1), 219-234. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085156
Dunn, M., Terrill, A., Reesink, G., Foley, RA., & Levinson, SC. (2005) Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History. Science, 309(5743), 2072-2075. DOI: 10.1126/science.1114615
Dunn M, Greenhill SJ, Levinson SC, & Gray RD. (2011) Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature, 473(7345), 79-82. PMID: 21490599
Gibson, E., & Fedorenko, E. (2010) Weak quantitative standards in linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(6), 233-234. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.03.005
Gray, RD., & Atkinson, QD. (2003) Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature, 426(6965), 435-439. DOI: 10.1038/nature02029
Haspelmath, M. (2010) Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86(3), 663-687. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2010.0021
Holm, HJ. (2007) The new arboretum of Indo-European "trees". Can new algorithms reveal the phylogeny and even prehistory of Indo-European?. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 14(2-3), 167-214. DOI: 10.1080/09296170701378916
Nakhleh, L., Warnow, T., Ringe, D., & Evans, S. (2005) A comparison of phylogenetic reconstruction methods on an Indo-European dataset. Transactions of the Philological Society, 103(2), 171-192. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-968X.2005.00149.x
Nichols, J., & Warnow, T. (2008) Tutorial on Computational Linguistic Phylogeny. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5), 760-820. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00082.x
Serva, M., & Petroni, F. (2008) Indo-European languages tree by Levenshtein distance. EPL (Europhysics Letters), 81(6), 68005. DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/81/68005
Shanon, Benny. (1978) The genetic code and human language. Synthese, 39(3), 401-415. DOI: 10.1007/BF00869557
- November 12, 2011
- 04:17 PM
- 170 views
Never mind language, emotions are in a category of their own
by Hannah Little in A Replicated Typo 2.0
A new paper in the journal 'Emotion' has presented research which has implications for the evolution of language, emotion and for theories of linguistic relativity. ... Read more »
Sauter DA, Leguen O, & Haun DB. (2011) Categorical perception of emotional facial expressions does not require lexical categories. Emotion (Washington, D.C.). PMID: 22004379
- October 27, 2011
- 05:02 AM
- 367 views
Tea Leaves and Lingua Francas: Why the future is not easy to predict
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Tweet We all take comfort in our ability to project into the future. Be it through arbitrary patterns in Spring Pouchong tea leaves, or making statistical inferences about the likelihood that it will rain tomorrow, our accumulation of knowledge about the future is based on continued attempts of attaining certainty: that is, we wish to [...]... Read more »
Taleb, N. (2007) Black Swans and the Domains of Statistics. The American Statistician, 61(3), 198-200. DOI: 10.1198/000313007X219996
- October 13, 2011
- 10:48 AM
- 286 views
Robustness, Evolvability, Degeneracy and stuff like that…
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
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Much of the work I plan to do for this year involves integrating traditional and contemporary theories of language change within an evolutionary framework. In my previous post I introduced the concept of degeneracy, which, to briefly recap, refers to components that have a structure-to-function ratio of many-to-one, with a single degenerate structure being . . . → Read More: Robustness, Evolvability, Degeneracy and stuff like that…... Read more »
Cheshire, J. (2007) Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(2), 155-193. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00317.x
Whitacre, J. (2010) Degeneracy: a link between evolvability, robustness and complexity in biological systems. Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, 7(1), 6. DOI: 10.1186/1742-4682-7-6
- October 5, 2011
- 12:14 PM
- 174 views
Cultural differences in lateral transmission: Phylogenetic trees are OK for Linguistics but not biology
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
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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 29, 2011
- 01:15 PM
- 318 views
Does a Smart Phone make Smart Science?
by Hannah Little in A Replicated Typo 2.0
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A new paper in plos one, published today, has shown that experiments on human cognition needn’t be confined to the lab.
Experiments on human cognitive abilities, such as language, often rely on testing small and homogeneous groups of volunteers (mostly undergraduate students) coming to research facilities where they are asked to participate in behavioral experiments. This arrangement is not . . . → Read More: Does a Smart Phone make Smart Science?... Read more »
Stephane Dufau, Jon Andoni Dun˜ abeitia, Carmen Moret-Tatay, Aileen McGonigal, David Peeters, F.-Xavier Alario, David A. Balota, Marc Brysbaert, Manuel Carreiras, Ludovic Ferrand, Maria Ktori, Manuel Perea, Kathy Rastle, Olivier Sasburg, Melvin J. Yap, J. (2011) Smart Phone, Smart Science: How the Use of Smartphones Can Revolutionize Research in Cognitive Science. PlosOne, 6(9). info:/10.1371/journal.pone.0024974
- September 24, 2011
- 06:58 PM
- 199 views
Language is not necessary for analogy
by Hannah Little in A Replicated Typo 2.0
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Analogy is a trait thought to be uniquely human and the origin is largely unknown. Recent studies have suggested that some language trained apes can find relations between relations, which is thought to be what is at the root of analogy. However, a new study in the journal Psychological Science has tested baboons using shapes . . . → Read More: Language is not necessary for analogy... Read more »
Fagot J, & Thompson RK. (2011) Generalized Relational Matching by Guinea Baboons (Papio papio) in Two-by-Two-Item Analogy Problems. Psychological science. PMID: 21934135
- September 22, 2011
- 09:14 AM
- 323 views
Degeneracy, Evolution and Language
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
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Having had several months off, I thought I’d kick things off by looking at a topic that’s garnered considerable interest in evolutionary theory, known as degeneracy. As a concept, degeneracy is a well known characteristic of biological systems, and is found in the genetic code (many different nucleotide sequences encode a polypeptide) and immune responses (populations . . . → Read More: Degeneracy, Evolution and Language... Read more »
Edelman, G. (2001) Degeneracy and complexity in biological systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(24), 13763-13768. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.231499798
Whitacre, J. (2010) Degeneracy: a link between evolvability, robustness and complexity in biological systems. Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, 7(1), 6. DOI: 10.1186/1742-4682-7-6
- September 11, 2011
- 01:06 PM
- 408 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
- 491 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
- 600 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
- 528 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
- 589 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
- 658 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
- 540 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
- 473 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
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