Hannah

“Music and the Origins of Language. International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity”.

Find call for Participation below.

“Music and the Origins of Language. International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity”.

15 – 20 September 2013, Cortona, Italy
http://ai.vub.ac.be/events/cortona-2013

The Evolutionary Linguistics Association (ELA) is proud to announce its second summer school in Cortona on Music and the Origins of Language. The school is intended for postdocs, lecturers and predocs with a background in computer science and a strong interest in music and the origins of language.

The summer school will be held in Cortona, Italy from Sunday 15 September to Friday 20 September 2013. Lectures, activities and meals are all collocated in Hotel Oasi and the Palazzone di Cortona. Participants will all stay at Hotel Oasi.

The summer school has a wide-ranging program of background lectures introducing concepts from biology, anthropology, psychology, music theory and linguistics that are helpful to understand the nature of creativity, the role and intimate relations between language and music, and the mechanisms underlying cultural evolution. It further contains technical lectures on the fundamental computational components required for language processing as well as technical ateliers to learn how to set up evolutionary linguistics experiments. Participants have the opportunity to present their latest research in a poster session. Embedded in the school is an ERC workshop of the Flow Machines project on musical style and composition. The school also features artistic ateliers in which participants create new creative works and engage in performance.

Interested researchers can apply by following the registration information that is available on the website. There are a limited number of scholarships available that cover participation and accommodation fees.

It receives support from FP7 PRAISE and INSIGHT projects, the euCognition Network of Excellence and the ESF project DRUST.

For information and queries, please visit the website http://ai.vub.ac.be/events/cortona-2013/ or email cortona2013@ai.vub.ac.be.

More Language Evolution positions available

It’s job frenzy out there. You can see here seven postdoctoral positions in the Dutch research consortium “Language in Interaction” including one on language evolution below:

WP 5: Language evolution and diversity

The goal of this WP is to contribute to a better understanding of the biological underpinnings of linguistic universality as well as diversity, both at the population level (between languages and between species) and at the individual level (within a language). We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher in this area. The preferred area of specialization is evolutionary modelling of language with respect to diversity in communication. Other possible areas of expertise may include language diversity, individual differences in language abilities, animal communication, and genetic influences on speech and language.

Contact information WP 5: Prof. Pieter Muysken, p.muysken@let.ru.nl

The deadline for applications is May 15, 2013 for a September start date. More details on the document here:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1HErCprWm1KZauFiKNEaswRmblG2HJZlydRSbDODEKfVkZ48BQzen3ems-h43/edit

Positions available on major Research Project on Cultural and Cognitive Evolution

The university of St. Andrews is on a hiring frenzy:

Applications are invited to join an interdisciplinary research programme directed by Professors Kevin Laland (School of Biology) and Andrew Whiten (School of Psychology and Neuroscience) at the University of St Andrews’ Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution. “Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Culture Complexity, Creativity and Trust” is funded through a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Successful candidates will join a team of over 20 researchers working on the project, studying aspects of social learning, innovation and cultural evolution in monkeys, apes and human participants, employing a diversity of techniques including systematic observation, experiments and statistical modelling.

Two Lectureships: Lecturer in Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology (School of Biology);

Lecturer in Comparative, Evolutionary or Developmental Psychology (School of Psychology). Salary £37,382 – £45,941 per annum. Ref No: ML1133. Closing Date 7 April 2013.

Eight Postdoctoral Research Assistantships: £30,424 – £36,298 per annum. Ref No: SB1299.Closing Date 5 April 2013.

Up to ten PhD Scholarships. For further particulars and how to apply see http://lalandlab.st-andrews.ac.uk/opportunities.html.

Positions are for 33 months (salaried posts) or three years (PhD), commencing 1st September 2013 or as soon as possible thereafter. For the Lectureships & Postdoctoral Research Assistants only, we encourage applicants to apply online at www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/welcome.aspx, where further particulars of all posts can be viewed. However if you are unable to do this, please call +44 (0)1334462571 for an application pack.

Please quote the appropriate reference number on all correspondence.

The University is committed to equality of opportunity.

The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland (No SC013532).

The press release announcing the grant states:

The new project will use comparative studies of social learning among monkeys, apes and human children together with sophisticated statistical modeling and a diverse range of other methods to address a suite of such ‘Big Questions’ about the evolution of culture, a field in which St Andrews is a world leader. “When we talk of ‘culture’ in this project, we include everything that is learned from others, from our language to our technology and moral codes. Our cultural nature is arguably the most important characteristic that separates us from even our closest primate relatives”, says Professor Whiten. “Nevertheless, we can learn much about the evolutionary roots of our cultural capacities by studying the social traditions of monkeys and apes, and that will be an important part of this project”.

“Our unique human ability to make cultures evolve cumulatively, building on what others achieved before us, depends on two essential elements highlighted in the project title”, adds Professor Laland: “creativity, which produces new innovations, and trust, which guides which innovations are adopted and spread. We will be investigating how humans and other animals decide whom to trust as sources of cultural information and what other forms of cultural filtering are important”.

So it sounds very relevant for Language Evolution bods!

The Evolution of Speech: Lip-smacking monkeys

In January, Ghazanfar, Morrill & Kayser published a paper in PNAS entitled “Monkeys are perceptually tuned to facial expressions that exhibit a theta-like speech rhythm”. The abstract is below:

Human speech universally exhibits a 3- to 8-Hz rhythm, corresponding to the rate of syllable production, which is reflected in both the sound envelope and the visual mouth movements. Artificial perturbation of the speech rhythm outside the natural range reduces speech intelligibility, demonstrating a perceptual tuning to this frequency band. One theory posits that the mouth movements at the core of this speech rhythm evolved through modification of ancestral primate facial expressions. Recent evidence shows that one such communicative gesture in macaque monkeys, lip-smacking, has motor parallels with speech in its rhythmicity, its developmental trajectory, and the coordination of vocal tract structures. Whether monkeys also exhibit a perceptual tuning to the natural rhythms of lip-smacking is unknown. To investigate this, we tested rhesus monkeys in a preferential-looking procedure, measuring the time spent looking at each of two side-by-side computer-generated monkey avatars lip-smacking at natural versus sped-up or slowed-down rhythms. Monkeys showed an overall preference for the natural rhythm compared with the perturbed rhythms. This lends behavioral support for the hypothesis that perceptual processes in monkeys are similarly tuned to the natural frequencies of communication signals as they are in humans. Our data provide perceptual evidence for the theory that speech may have evolved from ancestral primate rhythmic facial expressions.

Writing in Nature, last week, Techumseh Fitch wrote a short news article on Ghazanfar’s findings including a very concise but clear outline on the two main hypotheses for the evolutionary origin of human speech, which he also goes over in his 2010 book. Namely, the hypothesis that speech is derived from primate vocalizations as the same vocal production system (lungs, larynx and vocal tract) is used to produce both primate calls and speech. However, as Fitch states, “a problem is that human speech is unique among primate vocalizations in being a very flexible, learned signal, whereas most primate calls have a strong, species-specific genetic determination. The ‘vocal origins’ hypothesis favours evolutionary continuity of vocal production over a hypothetical discontinuity in vocal control and vocal learning.”

The second hypothesis is MacNeilage’s hypothesis that speech rhythms originated not in the vocal, but in the visual domain. As the mouth generates not just vocal, but also visual, signals. The strength in this hypothesis lies in the fact that these articulators are under learned voluntary control in non-human primates. MacNeilage argues that speech develops in babies’ babbling as a lip-smacking behaviour superimposed on a vocal signal. Fitch states: “This rhythmic stream is then differentially modified, by learned tongue and lip movements, into the vowels and consonants of speech. Support for this hypothesis comes from previous work demonstrating that the detailed kinematics of lip-smacking are strikingly similar to those of speech. But Ghazanfar and colleagues’ work adds support from the domain of perception, indicating that perceptual tuning for the two signal classes is also consistent with MacNeilage’s hypothesis.”

As has been covered on this blog before, a lot of research on speech evolution has focused on the descended larynx. This new research adds to the body of work that suggest that anatomy might not be as important as first imagined, and that neural control and vocal learning may be much more important.

A review of a review on Fitch’s The Evolution of Language

Maggie Tallerman has published a review of Techumseh Fitch’s 2010 book, “The Evolution of Language” in the journal of linguistics. It is largely very critical, mostly of Fitch’s ideas about a musical protolanguage stage preceding language, and of the fact that the focus of the book is largely about vocal imitation and the evolution of speech, rather than on linguistic (i.e. cognitive) features such as syntax, semantics and phonology. Tallerman is also very critical of a lack of an emphasis on the uniqueness of human language, stating:

The ﬁrst problem is that there isn’t enough emphasis on the exceptional nature of language as a human faculty. In particular, the putative parallels with animal communication and cognition are at times exaggerated. Take statements like this: ‘[e]ven syntax, at least at a simple level, ﬁnds analogs in other species (e.g. bird and whale ‘‘song’’) which can help us to understand both the brain basis for syntactic rules and the evolutionary pressures that can drive them to become more complex’ (18). While there’s SOME truth in the ﬁrst half, given the existence of both hierarchical structure and simple dependencies in animal ‘syntax’ (see Hurford 2012 for an excellent survey), I fear that a non-linguist reading the claim that analogues of syntax are found in other animals would get entirely the wrong idea. Grammatical systems in language are NOT merely a more complex version of animal communication systems, which are entirely non-compositional, with no duality of patterning, and which do not contain word classes or headed phrases.

I feel like Tallerman is claiming that her view that language is exceptional as indisputable fact, rather than as a standpoint. However, the view that language is unique among cognitive processes and is unique to humans, is still a very contentious matter and many linguists, biologists and cognitive scientists hold the legitimate opinion that language may well just be the result of domain general cognitive processes and that comparative studies of human and animal abilities have a large roll to play in the future of language evolution research. This is certainly a very attractive standpoint for biologists. I know Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002), the paper for which Fitch is probably most famous in language evolution, put some emphasis on their being an faculty for language, in both a broad (FLB) and narrow (FLN) sense, and Tallerman mentions that the FLN is, “namely, whatever is both uniquely human and uniquely linguistic”. But, Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) in fact argue that “FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of communication (for example, number, navigation, and social relations)” – which is completely consistent with the emphasis being away from language being so exceptional, and on the importance of animal studies.

Of course, any good text book should cover both sides of the argument, and perhaps Fitch doesn’t spend enough time covering the ins and outs of a controversy so central to the field of language evolution, but I don’t think that Tallerman’s criticisms consider the importance of both sides of the argument either. I’m also not sure why she quotes Chomsky at the beginning of the paper. Chomsky said in his famous UCL talk:

There’s a ﬁeld called ‘evolution of language’ which has a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense … In fact, it isn’t even about evolution of language, it’s almost entirely speculations about evolution of communication, which is a diﬀerent topic

Fitch has written a couple of papers with Chomsky, but the quote’s presence is confusing in a review of a book where Chomsky is not an author, and I can see no other reason to include it other than to confound Fitch with Chomsky’s views, which isn’t a very fair way to start a review judging Fitch’s book.

Beyond this, the main bulk of the paper is on Fitch’s treatment of the problem of cheap, honest signals and also of protolanguage and, in particular, musical protolanguage. She raises some excellent points and in light of the fact that I have things to be doing, you should go and read it here if you’re interested: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8836742

New paper on the emergence of hierarchical structure

After Berwick, Friederici, Chomsky, Bolhuis (2013) last month, Berwick has contributed to another paper featuring evidence from birdsong. Miyagawa, Berwick and Okanoya (2013) is published in frontiers of psychology here. Abstract below:

We propose a novel account for the emergence of human language syntax. Like many evolutionary innovations, language arose from the adventitious combination of two pre-existing, simpler systems that had been evolved for other functional tasks. The first system, Type E(xpression), is found in birdsong, where the same song marks territory, mating availability, and similar “expressive” functions. The second system, Type L(exical), has been suggestively found in non-human primate calls and in honeybee waggle dances, where it demarcates predicates with one or more “arguments,” such as combinations of calls in monkeys or compass headings set to sun position in honeybees. We show that human language syntax is composed of two layers that parallel these two independently evolved systems: an “E” layer resembling the Type E system of birdsong and an “L” layer providing words. The existence of the “E” and “L” layers can be confirmed using standard linguistic methodology. Each layer, E and L, when considered separately, is characterizable as a finite state system, as observed in several non-human species. When the two systems are put together they interact, yielding the unbounded, non-finite state, hierarchical structure that serves as the hallmark of full-fledged human language syntax. In this way, we account for the appearance of a novel function, language, within a conventional Darwinian framework, along with its apparently unique emergence in a single species.

This seems to be slightly in contrast to Berwick, Friederici, Chomsky, Bolhuis (2013), which at times seems to hint that looking at abilities in other species is probably useless because language is so special and specific to humans, but it does share a lot of the same themes.

The 3rd annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution

There’s the European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association (EHBEA), the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), and the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) too. I’m reminded of the People’s Front of Judea.

Anyway… the 3rd annual meeting of the ESHE will be held in Vienna, Austria, on 20-21 September, 2013. The meeting will be hosted by the local organizer Professor Gerhard Weber, from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna.

On Thursday 19 September, the eve of the opening of the meeting, a special keynote presentation will be given by Professor Tecumseh Fitch, from the University of Vienna, on the evolution of speech, language and music. The meeting will be held on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 September in the spectacular Großer Festsaal and Kleiner Festsaal at the University of Vienna. Each day will be composed of plenary podium sessions in the morning, specialized workshops in the afternoon and poster sessions in the early evening.

Submissions of topics in the broader field of evolutionary studies, outside of human paleontology and paleolithic archaeology, are especially encouraged this year. The submission should include a 1-2 page presentation of the subject, a list of participants with titles and short abstracts (200 words). Applications should be sent no later than 15 April and will be quickly reviewed so that selected participants can submit their full abstract in due time for the 31 May abstract deadline. Questions relating to the organization of these specialized sessions can be sent to abstracts@eshe.eu.

Meeting Registration for the 2013 ESHE Meeting in Vienna is available on our website http://www.eshe.eu/meetings.html.

There is 3000€ available for 2 or 3 student poster prizes. To be included in the running for a poster prize you must first submit your abstract via the online system, and check the box which states “Enter this poster in the Student Poster Competition”. A pdf of your poster must be sent to abstracts@eshe.eu by 31 August in order to be evaluated.

In case of Neanderthal uprising…

Recently there’s been quite a bit of news about Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School wanting an adventurous woman to give birth to a Neanderthal baby. Though the quotes are now being said to be completely fabricated.

However, this cropped up on Adam Van Arsdale’s blog today and I thought it funny enough to share here.

The New Pluralistic Approach

There has been a lot of talk round these parts recently of the merits of pluralistic approaches to problems in language evolution, and condemning the assignment of too much explanatory power to statistical correlations away from other forms of evidence, such as cultural learning experiments. Sean and James recently published a paper about this here which includes some commentary on Hay & Bauer (2007), who find that speaker population size and phoneme inventory size correlate (the more speakers a language has, the bigger its phoneme inventory is). James has blogged about this extensively here. More recently Moran, McCloy & Wright presented a critical analysis of Hay & Bauer’s (2007) findings here along with a statistical analysis of their own which uses more languages than Hay & Bauer (2007), and finds little to no correlation between speaker population and various measures of the phonological system, I hope James will do a blog about this as the resident expert.

As I’ve just mentioned, doing further statistical analysis is one good way of disputing or confirming the results of large scale statistical studies. But turning to experimental evidence is also a good way to back up the findings of statistical results and to tease out patterns of causation. I discuss this briefly here.

Recently, I was reading Selten & Warglien (2007) (mentioned by James here and covered by John Hawks here), which is a study which looks at how simple languages emerge within a coordination task with no initial shared language. The experiment uses pairwise interactions in which participants had to refer to figures which could be distinguished using features on three levels of outer shape, inner shape and colour (see picture). Participants were given a code which had a limited number of letters which they were to use to communicate with one another. However, the use of letters within this code had a cost within the language game the participants were playing, so the less letters they used the higher their score. Also, the more communicatively successful they were, the higher their score.

The study was primarily interested in what enhanced the emergence of structure in this code via the communication game. They looked at the effects of 2 variables, the number of letters available and variability in the set of figures. I am only going to discuss the effects of the first variable here. Selten & Warglien (2007) start off with an experiment where only two (and then three) letters were available which showed very little convergence to a common code. A common code is defined as being a code where the signals for all figures agree between the two participants. However, when given a larger inventory of letters to play with, participants were much more successful at creating a common code. This is not surprising as more symbols permit a higher degree of cost efficiency within the language game as you can use more distinct, shorter expressions. Selten & Warglien (2007) also make the point that the human capability to produce a large variety of phonetic signals seems to be at the root of the emergence of most linguistic structure, because if you only have a small inventory of individual units, you have to rely more on positional structure. Positional systems are systems like the Arabic number notation which are more likely invented rapidly rather than the product of slow emergence via cultural evolution, but can be easily used once they have emerged.

This is all very interesting in its own right, but the reason I brought it up in this post is that Selten & Warglien (2007) have shown that you can experimentally explore the effects of the size of inventory on an artificial language in a laboratory setting. I know that the natural direction of causation is to assume that demographic structure (e.g. the size of a population) affects the linguistic structure (e.g. the size of the phoneme inventory), but it might be possible to see whether a common code can be more easily reached within a small language community using only a small number of phonemes, than with a larger speaker community. I’m also not sure how one might create an experimental proxy for size of population in an experiment such as this (perhaps repeated interaction between the same participants compared with interaction within changing pairs). It might also be possible to look at the effects that the size of inventory can have on other linguistic features that have been hypothesised to correlate with population size, e.g. how regular the compositional structure of an emerging language is given difference inventory sizes.

References

Hay, J., & Bauer, L. (2007). Phoneme inventory size and population size Language, 83 (2), 388-400 DOI: 10.1353/lan.2007.0071

Roberts, S. & Winters, J. (2012). Social Structure and Language Structure: the New Nomothetic Approach. Psychology of Language and Communication, 16(2), pp. 79-183. Retrieved 12 Feb. 2013, from doi:10.2478/v10057-012-0008-6

Selten, R., & Warglien, M. (2007). The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (18), 7361-7366 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0702077104

Language Evolution 101: Gene’s Eye vs. DST

Broad hypothese are better than narrow ones as they can be applied to a wider range of things. That’s probably a controversial thing to say, but it’s certainly true that the beauty of most evolutionary theory lies in its simplicity, and therefore its ability to be applied to more than just biology. So how do different evolutionary theories fair when applied to the world of language? I’ll look here at the gene’s eye view of evolution and developmental systems theory.

The gene’s eye view of evolution

The gene’s eye view of evolution splits evolution up into the two processes, replication and interaction. The replicators are the things which are copied (generally genes) and the interactors are the organisms which interact with their environment. In this post I will be sticking with the terms ‘replicator’ and ‘interactor’ as posited by Hull (1980) as opposed to Dawkins’ ‘replicator’ and ‘vehicle’ as Hull’s terms are much more applicable to language as Hull formalised it as a generalised theory which Hull himself has applied to cultural evolution (Hull 1988).

Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry (1995) argue that since language and the genome are recursive then only these two mechanisms have an infinite number of heritable states which is why a replicator view of natural selection can only account for these two mechanisms. Many Linguists have tried to apply a replicator view to the evolution of language, both with regards to language’s biological and cultural evolution. Regarding the cultural evolution of language, there seems to be many parallels with biological evolution which can be drawn with the controversy as to what can be considered a replicator. David Hull (1980) defines a replicator as “an entity that passes on its structure directly in replication”. Within language this could qualify anything which allows us to say the same thing in a different way. This means that replicators can lie at a phonemic level, in that vowels can vary and some realisations will be more successful than others with regards to contrastive difference from other vowels. Morphemes can also vary and be more selectively successful in terms of productivity. Selection can work all the way up to lexemes and syntax, both on a wide scale, or on a narrow scale, with a specific idiosyncratic structure emerging in some frequently used phrases. If one of two interlocutors in a communicative act uses an idiosyncratic structure to express something, and is successful in being understood, then they will see little point in changing the utterance next time they want to express that proposition, this, presumably, would ‘catch on’. Croft (2000) lumps all of these possible replicators under a general heading of ‘lingueme’ to make them more analogous with genes. This may be an oversimplification, as layers of structure as they appear in language are not present in the DNA sequence (or at least not understood to the same level as they are in language) past the distinction of nucleotides, codons and ‘genes’, and even upon this distinction it is usually argued that single nucleotides and codons cannot be replicators, whereas, it seems that the smallest particles of language structure can be.

Croft (2000) argues that the selection of linguistic replicators is driven by social factors as he claims that speakers select variants with regards to their social values. However, as in biology, selection where not only functional selection, but sexual selection and social selection, also exist, it seems odd that language evolution would not also be driven by a combination of factors, both functional and social.

Language does not pass purely from vertical transmission from one generation to the next, as genes do, horizontal transmission is also present and there is linguistic input from more than just the two parents of an individual. Horizontal gene transfer, which occurs when an organism acquires genetic material from a different organism, but not through the process of replication or reproduction, could be described as analogous to this but this certainly isn’t the norm within genetic evolution as it is in the transmission of language (Pagel, 2009).

Developmental Systems Theory

Developmental Systems Theory (DST) is an approach to evolution in opposition to replicator/interactor view of natural selection. It takes the position that more things need to be taken into account than just replicators and interactors and that if anything is the unit of selection then it is the entire developmental system an organism takes. This stresses the importance of non-genetic factors and their role in evolution. Many layers of structure need to be considered and each of these layers of structure can only be accounted for in their own terms. A DST approach to the emergence of language is one which takes the whole developmental cycle of language acquisition and communication into account. The learning biases of children certainly counts as a unique event which is responsible for individual differences in each generation. As well as this, the learning biases of adults can also contribute to language evolution from a DST approach in societies where there are many second language speakers (Wray and Grace 2005). Learning biases in transmission are often cited exclusively in the context of cultural evolution; however, learning biases have now come to give us a good explanation as to how linguistic constraints may have become genetically assimilated after cultural transmission occurred though mechanisms such as the Baldwin Effect (Baldwin, 1896). If there’s any call for it I’ll post a 101 on the Baldwin Effect in the near future.

Refs

Baldwin, M. J. (1896) A New Factor in Evolution. The American Naturalist, Vol. 30, No. 354, 441-451.

Croft, W. (2000) Explaining language change: an evolutionary approach. Harlow: Pearson.

Hull, D. L., (1980). Individuality and Selection. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 11: 311–332.

Hull, D. L. (1988) Science as a process: an evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maynard-Smith, J. and Szathmáry, E. (1995) The major transitions in evolution.

Pagel, M. (2009). Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator. Nature Reviews Genetics, 10(6), 405-415.

Pinker, S. and P. Bloom (1990). Natural Language and Natural Selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13.4: 707-726.

Wray, A. and Grace, G. (2005) The consequences of talking to strangers: Evolutionary corollaries of socio-cultural influences on linguistic form. Lingua, 117 (3), 543-578