Author: Sean

Here’s a talk by János Németh on the Prehistory of Evolutionary Linguistics.   Németh demonstrates that thinking about the origins of language predates the Enlightenment by over a thousand years.  Ideas that actually appear pretty modern were discussed in Ancient Greece.  However, after this initial burst of progress, there was a thousand year gap where no progress was made.  Why is this?  Németh argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition of creation would make questioning the origins of langauge difficult for centuries.

I found his discussion of Ancient theories of langauge evolution interesting from an online resource and use them here to grind my own particular axe: the monolingual bias in linguistics (all the source material and the vast majority of the argument here comes from Németh’s thesis).

Continue reading “Ancient theories of language evolution: The origin of the monolingual myth”

Blatant abuse of the blog for personal reasons.  But what else is a blog for?

In 5 days time my band is performing at our first gig.

To promote it, I’ve written a parody of 5 Years time by Noah and the Whale

It’s about 5 million years of language evolution.

Luckily, I won’t be playing the ukulele at the gig.  But there will be 4 comedy music acts, an instrument that the whole audience plays though a room full of balloons and an appearance by Dr. Gordon Freeman.  It’s at the City Cafe, Edinburgh, at 7pm on the 1st July.  Here’s a promotional video made using the Half-Life 3D engine.

Videos from the plenary lectures of the Evolution of Language conference are now online, here. The setup is quite impressive, with seperate videos of the speakers and slides.

The cover shot comes from one of my favourite moments of EvoLang, when Russel Gray taught us how to play a cut shot in cricket (about 43 minutes into his talk).

You can read some reviews of talks at Evolang on Replicated Typo:

Network structure and the effect of L2 learners on language change
Simon Fisher: Molecular Windows into Speech and Language
Boeckx on integrating biolingustics and cultural evolution
Luke McCrohon on horizontal transfer
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s plenary talk
Brain activity during the emergence of a grounded communication game
Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language
Bart de Boer on Fact-free science
Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition
The Evolution of Morphological Agreement
Holistic or synthetic protolanguage: evidence from iterated learning of whistled signals
A Bottom Up Approach to Language Evolution

The Nomothetic approach to language evolution

Honest Signalling between plants and insects

On linguistic replicators
Evolang coverage: Andrew Smith: Linguistic replicators are not observable, nor replicators
Evolang Coverage: More on linguistic replicators
In Search of the Wild Replicator
Wild Replicator’s Got Funky Rhythm, Part 1
Wild Replicator’s Got Funky Rhythm, Part 2

 

Here are the results from yesterday’s Evolve a Band Name experiment.  The top three names were ‘Chessclub’, ‘Cloaca’ and ‘Protons versus Neutrons’! I have to say, there is a lot of creativity evident in the data!  Also, a technical oversight on my part leads to a lesson about cultural evolution…

If you haven’t taken part yet, go here!

Method
Participants were presented with 10 band names for 20 seconds. They had to memorise them and then they were asked to reproduce each one. They entered names one at a time and were prevented from entering names that they had already entered. After entering 10 names, the participants were given a score (based on Levenshtein distance). Their names were recorded and passed on to the next participant as their input.  At the time of writing, 144 trials had been recorded.

The analysis was complicated by a technical oversight. I assumed that only one person would play this at a time. I was running many chains (14) in parallel, and each person is assigned to a chain when they log in, but the chain list was not updated until they finished the experiment. The result is that a single chain could split into many chains, and I had no way of automatically recovering the history of transmission. Lesson learned.  If you’d like to see the raw data, look here (each line is a generation, each name separated by an underscore, first 7 lines of each file is the initial random stimuli).

Results
Here’s an analysis done by hand (click to expand).

Continue reading “Results of Evolve a Band Name!”

Edit:  The results are out!

Me and my band are looking for a new name.  It’s a tough decision: we need one that’s clear and catchy.  If only there was a process that took some names and made them more easily learnable.  Wait, what about Iterated Learning? (see Jame’s post for a summary)

Click here to participate in our Band Name experiment.  It takes about two minutes.

We took some band names, randomly generated from this site, and present them to you for a short amount of time.  You then have to remember them.  We pass the names you remember onto the next participant.  Yes, you could just add your own band names, but they won’t reach the end of the chain unless they’re memorable.  You can participate more than once, but not more than 10 times.

While the iterated learning experiment methodology originates with Kirby, Cornish & Smith (2008), this experiment has no mapping between signals and meanings, so is more similar to the experiments of Keelin Murray (e.g. here), Tessa Verhoef (e.g. Verhoef & de Boer, 2011, see here too) and Lili Fullerton (e.g. Fullerton, 2011).  These experiments also used music as the thing that is culturally transmitted.

I’ll post the results up once we get some.

Me and my band are hosting a night of musical comedy on the 30th of June in Edinburgh.  If you’d like to perform, get in touch.

References
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

Tallerman, M. (2007). Did our ancestors speak a holistic protolanguage? Lingua, 117 (3), 579-604 DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2005.05.004

Last week in an EU:Sci podcast, Christos Christodoulopoulos challenged me to find a correlation between the basic word order of the language people use and the number of children they have.  This was off the back of a number of spurious correlations with which readers of Replicated Typo will be familiar.  Here are the results!

First, I do a straightforward test of whether word order is correlated with the number of children you have.  This comes out as significant!  I wonder if  having more children hanging around affects the adaptive pressures on langauge?  However, I then show that this result is undermined by discovering that there are other linguistic variables that are even better predictors.

Continue reading “Having more children affects your basic word order”

This week’s EU:Sci podcast includes an interview with me about my work on spurious correlations between social structures and linguistic structures (see my overview post here).  Christos Christodoulopoulos challenges me to find a link between the number of children a family has and the basic word order they use.  Complete nonsense with an important message:  Any correlation is possible.

Edit: A longer version of my interview at EU:Sci is now available online, Listen here!

Finally, antagonists of the ‘tree’ view of evolution have a metaphor of their own (from SMBC).