Hannah

What happens when you get a Zebra Finch drunk?

It has now been some time since Sean posed the research question as to whether a population’s consumption of alcohol can affect the structure of that population’s language. This hypothesis is born from the finding that alcohol consumption affects procedural but not declarative memory (Smith & Smith, 2003).

This question was brought to the front of my mind again today after an article appeared in New Scientist about the findings of a study which looked at what happens when you get Zebra Finches drunk.

Zebra finches are interesting to those studying language evolution because they are known to use vocal learning to acquire their repertoire of songs. We also know that these songs can be passed on through cultural transmission and accumulate structure based on the cognitive biases of the finches, just as language does in humans.

It is not a hard leap to draw parallels between early human speech acquisition and the song development of birds (Doupe & Kuhl, 1999). Both humans and birds are known to babble and in both innate biases and constraints interact with environmental influences to produce the final vocal output (Feher et al. 2008).

The findings published in new scientist (though, as yet, nowhere else), state that binge drinking may permanently impair juvenile finches’ ability to learn new songs and that, while normal young Zebra Finches “babble” and experiment before settling on their own song, which is inspired by the songs of the finches around them, the drinking finches experimented less, and settled on a simple song at early on.

Christophen Olson, who presented the findings, said that the results may tell us something about how learning behaviour in the adolescent human brain is affected by binge drinking. It is an interesting thought experiment to consider how human language may culturally evolve in a population of individuals binge drinking from an early age. I don’t think we’re going to get this one past the ethics board though.

Thanks to Rosalind King for pointing out this article to me.

Refs

Doupe, A.J. and Kuhl, P.K. (1999). Birdsong and Human Speech: Common Themes and Mechanisms. Annu. Rev. Neurosci., 13, 567-631.

Feher, O., Mitra, P.P., Sasahara, K., Tchernichovski, O., 2008. Evolution of song culture in the zebra finch. In A.D. Smith, K. Smith, R. Ferrer i Cancho, eds., The Evolution of Language. World Scientific Publishing: Singapore, pp. 423–424.

Smith C, & Smith D (2003). Ingestion of ethanol just prior to sleep onset impairs memory for procedural but not declarative tasks. Sleep, 26 (2), 185-91 PMID: 12683478

International Conference on Evolutionary Patterns

I’ve reposted this from http://www.evolutionarylinguistics.org/ as I thought it would be of interest to readers:

Call deadline: 1 February 2013
Event Dates: 17-19 May 2013
Event Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Event URL: http://evolutionarypatterns.fc.ul.pt/sub/cfa/cfa.html

Call for bioinformaticians, evolutionary biologists, microbiologists, paleontologists, geologists, physicists, mathematicians, anthropologists, archeologists, linguists, sociologists, economists, and philosophers and historians of science to provide talks on the following topics:

Conceptualization, quantification and modeling of horizontal and vertical transmission in biological and sociocultural sciences
- Bioinformatic approaches in biology, paleontology, anthropology, archeology, linguistics, sociology, and economics. These approaches can include: phylogenetics, phylogenomics, complex network based models, mathematical and statistical (computer) simulations, imaging techniques, (multi-)agent models, Complex Adaptive Systems approaches, …
- Tree versus network diagrams
- Mechanisms of horizontal and/or vertical transmission
- Parallels and differences between biological and sociocultural trait transmission and inter-individual interactions
Conceptualization, quantification and modeling of micro- and macroevolution in biological and sociocultural sciences
- Mechanisms of biological and/or sociocultural micro- and macroevolution
- Modes of biological and/or sociocultural micro- and macroevolution
- Tempos of biological and/or sociocultural micro- and macroevolution
- (Meta-)Patterns of evolution
- Parallels and differences between biological and sociocultural micro- and macroevolution
Hierarchy theory and the units, levels and mechanisms of evolution
- Units of biological and/or sociocultural evolution
- Levels of biological and/or sociocultural evolution, multilevel selection theories
- Mechanisms of biological and sociocultural evolution
- (Nested) Hierarchy theory
- Emergence
- Upward and downward causation
How the universal application of evolutionary theories enables new possibilities for inter- and transdisciplinary research and the unification of the sciences
- The need for an Extended Synthesis
- Universal Darwinism, Universal Selectionism
- The universality of symbiogenesis, reticulate evolution, hybridization, drift, patterns of punctuated equilibria, the ratchet effect, the Baldwin effect, …
- (Applied) Evolutionary Epistemology
- Unification of the sciences through shared research frameworks, methodologies, modeling techniques
- Philosophical analyses and historical accounts on attempts to unify the biological and the sociocultural sciences based upon evolutionary theory

We encourage submissions of (1) concrete models and simulations, (2) theoretical, reflexive talks, and (3) historical accounts on any of the above mentioned topics.

Please see the conference website for submission details.

The Evolution of Speech: Learned Vocalisations in Mice

Mice can learn vocalisations! A new article realised today on PLOS ONE by Gustavo Arriaga, Eric Zhou and Erich Jarvis, shows that mice share some of the same mechanisms used to learn vocal patterning in songbirds and humans.

Very few animals have the capacity for vocal learning. This ability allows species to modify the sequence and pitch of sounds that create songs or speech. Currently, only three groups of birds – parrots, hummingbirds and songbirds – and some mammalian species – humans, whales, dolphins, sea lions, bats and elephants – have demonstrated vocal learning. This ability is still yet to be found even in non-human primates.

This study looks at the ultrasonic vocalizations known as mouse ‘song’ and provides evidence that mice can change at least one acoustic feature of these vocalizations based on their social exposure.

Two mice were put together and over time learned to match the pitch of their songs to one another. The paper suggests this is a limited form of vocal learning.

The paper also shows evidence that the mice can control their vocal motor neurons. In the press release, Erich Jarvis states, “This is an exciting find, as the presence of direct forebrain control over the vocal neurons may be one of the most critical aspects in the human evolution of speech.”

While this vocal learning in mice seems to be much more primitive than in songbirds or humans, it may reveal some of the intermediate steps in the process by which vocalization evolved in advanced vocal learners like songbirds and humans.

Exciting stuff!

References

Arriaga G, Zhou EP, Jarvis ED (2012) Of Mice, Birds, and Men: The Mouse Ultrasonic Song System Has Some Features Similar to Humans and Song-Learning Birds. PLoS ONE 7(10): e46610. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046610

The continuing rise of physics envy

A few weeks back, James posted a paper about the “Linguistic Big Bang”. Now here’s a paper about protolanguage and the linguistic “God Particle”. I’m happy to see that physics envy in the linguistic community is far from dead!

Abstract

Most scholars investigating the evolution of language subscribe to the hypothesis that protolanguage occurred as an intermediate stage between the speechless state of our remote ancestors and modern language. But some scholars – Noam Chomsky and fellow biolinguists, Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva, and others – have expressed serious doubts about the existence of protolanguage. The present article investigates the cause of this disagreement and what it reveals about the nature of influential modern work on language evolution. It does this by analysing the case made by Derek Bickerton for the existence of protolanguage, as well as Noam Chomsky’s case against the existence of protolanguage. Both cases are shown to be weak, resting on a range of implicit and/or contentious assumptions. Invoking a conceptual distinction illustrated by physicists’ hunt for the “God particle”, the article argues that the case for the existence of protolanguage has not been strengthened by recent work attributing specific properties to protolanguage. To conclude, the article discusses the conceptual means needed for shoring up the assumption that evidence for the existence of protolanguage can be derived from so-called living linguistic fossils.

Botha, R. (2012) Protolanguage and the “God particle”, Lingua, Volume 122, Issue 12, Pages 1308-1324, ISSN 0024-3841, 10.1016/j.lingua.2012.07.005.

Language Evolution in 50 Words

Every week the British Interactive Group (BIG) (a skill sharing network for science communicators) have a competition among their members on the mailing list to explain a phenomenon in 50 words. This is known as the “Friday Phenomenon” and the person who does the best job at being both informative and engaging with such a small word count inherits the job of deciding what the next “phenomenon” will be. A couple of weeks ago I had the honour of being that person and the question I asked people to answer in 50 words (rather predictably) was: “How did structure evolve in human language?”

I thought you’d enjoy reading the entries and remember, these people are professional science communicators, not linguists!

Alexander Brown (You can read Alex’s blog here: http://alexanderbrown.info/tag/being-bilingual/)

How did structure evolve in human language?

Because there are no records, it is hard to say how human language formed.

It was doubtless linked to the evolution of the brain.

Structure gives context to words, increasing the amount of information they carry. This was an improvement on less meaningful assemblies.

Mark Lewney:

Language must encode 4D reality.

“[Elk herd], [sunrise direction], [half day away]” is fine for the present.

To change the future, nouns must verb.

“[Ug and Og] CHASE [biggest antlers] then [Thag and Derek] REPLACE [Ug and Og] then [everyone] CHUCKS [spears] at [biggest antlers]”

Blank slates can’t tell stories.

Dave Anseel:

Communicating the difference between run towards and run away is a evolutionary advantage…. especially if the object is a lion. Those who don’t understand fairly rapidly leave the gene pool.

Plus as group sizes increase communicating “what his Autie Uga did to our cousin Ogg” leads to grammar, or frustration.

Sam Steventon:

Lexical/sexual selection (sexical selection?) Structure in language has evolved to increase the success of obtaining mates. Conspicuous lexical traits – such as pronounced punctuation, increased vocabulary, or striking sentences increase the attractiveness of humans. This can be seen in the apparent mating success of musicians, comedians and moody writers.

Lewis Pike:

Language ideally supports precise, quick and clear communication. Playful and comprehensible too. Playful language uses ambiguity not precision. Meeting strangers and learning to understand them is important. Seduction is often slow and important. White lies aren’t clear but socially important. Dynamic tensions between needs these needs keeps languages evolving.

I decided that Sam won because of the invention of the process of “sexical selection”.

Information on how to join the BIG mailing list can be found here: http://www.big.uk.com/Default.aspx?pageId=749565

Monkeys can read! (not really)

OMG! Monkeys can read! Planet of the apes is coming! Not really.

OMG! Monkeys can read! Planet of the apes is coming! Not really. A new paper in Science by Grainger, Dufau, Montant, Ziegler and Fagot at the Aix-Marseille University found that Guinea baboons can be trained to differentiate between four letter English words and nonsense words. One monkey called Dan could recognise up to 300 written words, and by “recognise” I mean he knew those words could give him a treat, not that he could recognise that they signified objects in the world, which is what we mean when we say that a human has “recognised” a word. It’s a minefield isn’t it?

I wonder to what degree this is just a memory test or if the monkeys really are noticing relations between the letters which make up the words, as opposed to the nonsense words. The paper probably answers this. Bloody pay walls… Either way, I don’t think this is evidence to suggest that the role of phoneme-letter matching in humans learning to read should be undermined.

Language Evolution and The Impact Agenda

Let’s talk about funding.

I’m writing this post to generate some discussion about this subject, because when I’m not banging on about Language Evolution, my day job is to help people achieve research impact via the channels of community outreach/engagement and so it’s something I think about a lot. It’s probably worth noting here that “Language Evolution” throughout this post can be replaced by any blue-sky area of research.

Disclaimer: I know this blog has a global readership, but I’m sat in Britain and my whole experience of research funding has been in Britain, so sorry if the issues raised here aren’t relevant to you, I’d be interested to hear how some of these issues are tackled in different countries.

Firstly, I should probably outline what the impact agenda actually is because it currently seems to be one of those vague government-constructed concepts like the “Big Society” or “Broken Britain”. “Impact” is the economic and social benefits of research outside of academia and the “Impact Agenda” is the assessment of research with regards to its “Impact”. That’s the end of the use of quotation marks for this post. I promise.

The impact agenda is largely born out of the current financial climate and funding cuts which have seen universities struggle to sustain their revenue streams. This has meant a rise in the assessment of research by universities in terms of profit, as well as through funding bodies, via the Research Excellence Framework (REF), in terms of its impact outside of academia for having demonstrable benefits to the wider economy and society. Assessing the amount of funding a university department gets depending on impact is a highly controversial issue, with some claiming that it is undermining academic freedom and others arguing that it is an excellent way to ensure that academia is not an exclusive enterprise whose output only benefits those within the academic community.

Why is the impact agenda a good idea?
Having research which benefits the community is obviously a good thing – especially when that research is being funded by tax payers money. An excellent way to achieve impact in the community is to run bottom-up think-tanks where the priorities of the public become the priorities of the academic community. The outcomes of this research can then be fed back to the public who then feed further priorities into the research. This is a great model for much of the research done where immediate real-world applications exist, however there is much controversy surrounding the application of this model to the detriment of more blue sky research.

Why is the impact agenda a bad idea?
Many argue that the impact agenda undermines academic freedom as academics are being told what to research, rather than researching what they think it is best. Whilst it may be true that in some instances what the public consider to be a worthwhile avenue to explore may match up with what the academic community believe is worthwhile research, there will still be many other instances where academics wish to pursue hypotheses which the public will not see the value in – either because of a difference in values, or because of a gap in knowledge. The former is obviously a problem as the academics of this world are not a reasonable socio-economic sample of the population at large. The latter however, is probably a pretty watertight reason why academics get the last say in what it is they research. They are, after all, the intellectual cream of our society.

Why is all of this such a problem for the study of language evolution?
Research into the evolution of language is mostly within the realms of blue sky research – that is research having no immediately apparent real-world applications, but does this mean it’s not worthwhile and not worth funding in the current economic climate?

Topics for discussion:

Have you seen a noticeable decrease in funding in blue-sky areas?
What are the real-world applications of the study of language evolution?
Do you have any case studies where language evolution research has resulted in applications in the real world?
What might help increase the impact of research into language evolution?
Is this whole debate a false dichotomy?

Social networks and Cooperation

A new paper in Nature, by Apicella, Marlowe, Fowler & Christakis was published today. It hypothesises that social network structure may have been present in early human history, and this structure may account for the emergence of cooperation.

A new paper in Nature, by Apicella, Marlowe, Fowler & Christakis, was published today. It hypothesises that social network structure may have been present in early human history, and this structure may account for the emergence of cooperation. The study used data from the Haza people of Tanzania, who presumably already have cooperation, so I’m not sure what data they’re using to back up claims of emergence. I can’t read the article because I don’t have institutional access any more, so I’d be keen to hear thoughts others have.

Here’s the abstract:

Social networks show striking structural regularities, and both theory and evidence suggest that networks may have facilitated the development of large-scale cooperation in humans. Here, we characterize the social networks of the Hadza, a population of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. We show that Hadza networks have important properties also seen in modernized social networks, including a skewed degree distribution, degree assortativity, transitivity, reciprocity, geographic decay and homophily. We demonstrate that Hadza camps exhibit high between-group and low within-group variation in public goods game donations. Network ties are also more likely between people who give the same amount, and the similarity in cooperative behaviour extends up to two degrees of separation. Social distance appears to be as important as genetic relatedness and physical proximity in explaining assortativity in cooperation. Our results suggest that certain elements of social network structure may have been present at an early point in human history. Also, early humans may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin, based in part on their tendency to cooperate. Social networks may thus have contributed to the emergence of cooperation.

Advances in Visual Methods for Linguistics (AVML2012)

Some peeps over the the University of York are organising a conference on the advances in visual methods for linguistics (AVML) to take place in September next year.

Some peeps over the the University of York are organising a conference on the advances in visual methods for linguistics (AVML) to take place in September next year. This might be of interest to evolutionary linguists who use things like phylogenetic trees, networks, visual simulations or other fancy dancy visual methods. The following is taken from their website:

Linguistics, like other scientific disciplines, is centrally reliant upon visual images for the elicitation, analysis and presentation of data. It is difficult to imagine how linguistics could have developed, and how it could be done today, without visual representations such as syntactic trees, psychoperceptual models, vocal tract diagrams, dialect maps, or spectrograms. Complex multidimensional data can be condensed into forms that can be easily and immediately grasped in a way that would be considerably more taxing, even impossible, through textual means. Transforming our numerical results into graphical formats, according to Cleveland (1993: 1), ‘provides a front line of attack, revealing intricate structure in data that cannot be absorbed in any other way. We discover unimagined effects, and we challenge imagined ones.’ Or, as Keith Johnson succinctly puts it, ‘Nothing beats a picture’ (2008: 6).

So embedded are the ways we visualize linguistic data and linguistic phenomena in our research and teaching that it is easy to overlook the design and function of these graphical techniques. Yet the availability of powerful freeware and shareware packages which can produce easily customized publication-quality images means that we can create visual enhancements to our research output more quickly and more cheaply than ever before. Crucially, it is very much easier now than at any time in the past to experiment with imaginative and innovative ideas in visual methods. The potential for the inclusion of enriched content (animations, films, colour illustrations, interactive figures, etc.) in the ever-increasing quantities of research literature, resource materials and new textbooks being published, especially online, is enormous. There is clearly a growing appetite among the academic community for the sharing of inventive graphical methods, to judge from the contributions made by researchers to the websites and blogs that have proliferated in recent years (e.g. Infosthetics, Information is Beautiful, Cool Infographics, BBC Dimensions, or Visual Complexity).

In spite of the ubiquity and indispensability of graphical methods in linguistics it does not appear that a conference dedicated to sharing techniques and best practices in this domain has taken place before. This is less surprising when one considers that relatively little has been published specifically on the subject (exceptions are Stewart (1976), and publications by the LInfoVisgroup). We think it is important that researchers from a broad spectrum of linguistic disciplines spend time discussing how their work can be done more efficiently, and how it can achieve greater impact, using the profusion of flexible and intuitive graphical tools at their disposal. It is also instructive to view advances in visual methods for linguistics from a historical perspective, to gain a greater sense of how linguistics has benefited from borrowed methodologies, and how in some cases the discipline has been at the forefront of developments in visual techniques.

The abstract submission deadline is the 9th January.

Deictic Gestures in Ravens

Ravens can point. It’s scary how clever birds can be.

Guys! Guys! Guys!

Ravens can point. It’s scary how clever birds can be. People keep sending me this paper so I thought I’d link to it here so that people know I’ve seen it and stop bothering me (I actually don’t mind being bothered, especially if it’s about interesting things like this, please don’t stop). Abstract below.

Around the age of one year, human children start to use gestures to coordinate attention towards a social partner and an object of mutual interest. These referential gestures have been suggested as the foundation to engage in language, and have so far only been observed in great apes. Virtually nothing is known about comparable skills in non-primate species. Here we record thirty-eight social interactions between seven raven (Corvus corax) dyads in the Northern Alps, Austria during three consecutive field seasons. All observed behaviours included the showing and/or offering of non-edible items (for example, moss, twigs) to recipients, leading to frequent orientation of receivers to the object and the signallers and subsequent affiliative interactions. We report evidence that the use of declarative gestures is not restricted to the primate lineage and that these gestures may function as ‘testing-signals’ to evaluate the interest of a potential partner or to strengthen an already existing bond.

If you’re interested in reading about referencial gestures in humans and chipanzees and why these things are relevant to the evolution of language you should read Michael’s post here.