Some Links #15: Empires of the Word & anti-Babel

Empires of the Word & anti-Babel. It’s a few days old now but I’ve only just had time to read it. Anyway, check out Razib’s review of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the world. Lots of information for budding historical linguists and those intrigued by language spread and extinction. Particularly relevant is the following paragraph:

As I indicated above Empires of the Word is rather thin on robust generalizations. But one point which the author mentions repeatedly is that the rise and fall of languages of great expanse and utility is the norm, not the exception. In particular, Nicholas Ostler takes time out to emphasize that languages which spread via trade often do not have long term staying power. Portuguese, Aramaic, Punic and Sogdian would fall into this category (the later success of Portuguese was a matter of rice and empire in Brazil). It seems that mercantile communities are too ephemeral, that successive historical shocks inevitably result in their decline when there isn’t a peasant demographic reservoir or imperial power which imposes it by fiat. Even those languages which eventually spread beyond traders and gain cultural and political cachet may fall from grace. Greek is the best case of this. It was the dominant language of the Roman East, and spoken as far as modern Pakistan, and studied in Dark Age Ireland. By the early modern period it was a strange and foreign language in the West, and with the rise of Islam in the east it lost its cultural glamor, and even those Christians in Arab lands who were Melkite, Greek Orthodox who adhered to the theological position of Constantinople, became Arab in speech and identity (in greater Syria the Greek Orthodox have been instrumental in the formulation of Arab nationalism).

Opening a bibliography database for human evolution. Again, it’s been a few days since this was posted, but I’d advise anyone interested in human evolution visit John Hawks recently announced database. The bibliography section also has an RSS feed which provides a chronological list (newest first).

In which I apply for a job as a homeopath… Dave over at Anomalous Disaster has a great little post on him applying for a position at NHS Tayside for a homeopathic specialist. This is from the very same health board who recently brought us the sacking of 500 staff. So Dave decided to apply, which, at a cushy £68,000 salary, is definitely a job worth pursuing — after all, it can’t be that hard to dispense magic beans and provide a pseudo-scientific air of authority. Here is part of his letter of application:

The original research that I have published means that I am familiar with the body of published work on homeopathy, and the many meta-analyses and systematic reviews conducted on it. The fact that these conclude that homeopathy is no more effective than a similarly administered placebo will not bother me whilst I am taking advantage of some of the excellent salmon fishing to be found in the Tayside region. Indeed, given the fact the position only calls for the successful applicant to attend two sessions per week, I should imagine I would have plenty of time to indulge in a bit of fishing.

Click here to apply.

Selfish Sounds: Darwinism in linguistics. A brief(ish) article on the work of historical linguist, Nikolaus Ritt, and how words and sounds compete for the purpose of being replicated. Specifically, it looks at how the sound shapes of English words have gradually evolved:

Good examples of such phenomena are sets of changes which are obviously directed but unfold over time spans that are impossible to even survey by individual speakers. They have come to be known as ‘drifts’. A case of such a drift seems to have affected the sound shapes of English words (or better: lexical morphemes, i.e. the smallest linguistic units that carry meaning). Over time their shapes seem to have gradually evolved in a direction where they came to fit better into the rhythmical patterning that characterises English speech. “For instance, vowels in long words tended to be shortened over time, while vowels in short words tended to be lengthened. Thus, the rhythmic units they established became more uniform”, Nikolaus Ritt explains.

[…] From the evolutionary perspective this kind of development is best understood if one regards rhythm as an environmental constant in the linguistic world in which words and the sounds they are made up of have to survive and replicate. Because of the constant environmental pressure which rhythm exerts on them, the sound shapes of English words have gradually changed to become better adapted to the rhythmically structured utterances through which they get expressed and transmitted.

New Blog: Culture Evolves!

… Well, new to me at least. It’s run by Fiona Jordan of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and her latest post is an interview with one of my favourite researchers, Simon Greenhill (I didn’t know he designed a sudoku solving program). Also, after having done a little digging into her publications, I found the following forthcoming paper: The effect of population size and density on rates of linguistic evolution. Here is the abstract:

Evolutionary theory from population genetics predicts that demography may play an important role in determining the rate at which cultural and linguistic traits change over time. However, relatively few studies have explored this relationship for language at an appropriate scale and in a quantitative way, nor controlled for the problem of non-independence induced by the historical relationships between languages. Here we use phylogenetic trees of 351 Austronesian languages to test whether the rate of change in core vocabulary is affected by population size and population density. We detected a strong phylogenetic signal in both population size and density, indicating the need for historical control. We find a significant inverse relationship between lexical replacement and population size, no relationship with population density, and we confirm that splitting events influence lexical evolution. These results support the idea that a process analogous to genetic drift may be an important factor in lexical evolution. Furthermore, the strong phylogenetic signal in these demographic factors suggests that despite repeated population splits the social conditions that influence speech community size and density are maintained and inherited from one generation to the next.

I’m not going to say anything on a paper I haven’t yet read, other than it looks pretty cool and that more people should be considering the influence of demographic factors in linguistics.

Evolution of Colour Terms: 3 Perceptual Constraints

Continuing my series on the Evolution of Colour terms, this post reviews evidence for perceptual constraints on colour terms. For the full dissertation and for references, go here.

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Metroculturalism

Searching Research Blogging for “bilingualism”, two blogs dominate the recent posts: mine and Language on the Move – a blog started by Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.  Since starting last year, they have been joined by a host of international collaborators.  It’s a really well organised blog – they even have separate facebook and twitter officers!

The blog discusses topics on language learning, multilingualism and multicultural sociolinguistics.  The writers are bilingual and certainly pro-bilingualism, but it’s good to see a genuine debate over the so-called ‘bilingual edge’ (see Piller 2010- a review of ‘the bilingual edge’ which argues that differences elicited in controlled conditions don’t necessarily translate to the real world where variables are correlated).

There’s been a recent spurt of posts and publications aimed at trying to get people out of a mono-mindset.  Alastair Pennycook writes about Metrolingualism (see also, Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010) – the common use of many languages to construct identity.  He reminds us that people are most cultural traits are not mutually exclusive.  Indeed, the majority of people can communicate in many mediums.  Despite this, there is a tendency both in research and general opinion to see monolingualism as the norm and bilingualism as exceptional.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, the monolingual mindset extends into computational modelling of language acquisition and evolution.  Often, there are implicit monolingual assumptions.  On the other hand, whole paradigms such as Steels & Belpeame’s ‘Naming Game’ focus on how populations of agents can arrive at the same, single mapping between words and meanings.

In fact, there is much evidence to suggest that children can acquire multiple languages easily.  My own research focusses on a simple question – why did we evolve to be able to learn multiple languages?  It would be more efficient to have a single human language – especially if it were innately specified.  Instead, we have a culturally transmitted system that exhibits a large amount of variation.

I’m looking at two possible answers:  Either there is no selective pressure on language and bilingualism is the product of historical accident (drift) or there is an inherent advantage to the flexibility that bilingualism affords, both for communication and for the evolvability of the system.  Along the way, I’m hoping to look at whether monolingualism is a legitimate abstraction, or whether bilingualism is a fundamental part of language (for a recent talk, see here).

However, Pennycook points out the paradox of a monolingual mindset in a pervasively bilingual world, suggesting that it may be a  political affliction rather than a scientific approach:
“If we take the current sociolinguistic literature on styles, registers, discourses, genres and practices seriously, then monolingualism is also a myth: a monolingual mindset does not emerge from a state of monolingualism, because no such state can exist. If languages are myths, so too is monolingualism!”

Piller, I. (2010). The bilingual edge: why, when, and how to teach your child a second language International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13 (1), 115-118 DOI: 10.1080/13670050802645942

Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: fixity, fluidity and language in flux International Journal of Multilingualism, 7 (3), 240-254 DOI: 10.1080/14790710903414331

Evolution of Colour Terms: 1 Genetic Constraints

Continuing my series on the Evolution of Colour terms, this post reviews the evidence for genetic constrains on colour perception. For the full dissertation and for references, go here.

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Experiments in communication pt 2: Human Iterated Learning

ResearchBlogging.orgIn the last post, I discussed some of the literature into experimental communication, with the intention of then following it up by looking at recent experiments done at Edinburgh (and beyond). But as Hannah pipped me to the post, with a great overview of the wide range of experiments into language evolution, I’ll instead limit this to two relatively recent papers on Human Iterated Learning (Kirby et al., 2008; Cornish et al., 2009)

Drawing from experimental approaches found in Diffusion Chain and Artificial Language Learning studies, Kirby et al (2008) show that as a consequence of intergenerational transmission languages “culturally evolve in such a way as to maximize their own transmissibility: over time, the languages in our experiments become easier to learn and increasingly structured.” In these experiments a subject is exposed to an alien language, made up of two elements within a finite space: meanings (consisting of a picture with three discernible elements: colour, shape and movement) paired with signals (consisting of a string of letters). Importantly, the subject is only exposed to a set amount of meanings (SEEN items), after which they are then presented with a group of meanings (some SEEN, some UNSEEN) without the corresponding signal — the goal being that they provide a response (be it the correct version or not). On completion of forming the meaning-signal pairs the experiment is repeated, except this time the new subjects are trained on the data provided by the previous generation. This continues until the experiment is finished, which in this case happened at generation ten.

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Evolution of Colour Terms: Part 1

In a series of posts, I’ll review the current state of the field of the Evolution of Colour Categories.  It has been argued that universals in colour naming across cultures can be traced back to constraints from many domains including genetic, perceptual and environmental.    I’ll review these arguments and show that if our perception is affected by our language, then many conflicts can be resolved.  Furthermore, it undermines the Universalist assumption that universal patterns in colour terms are evidence for innate constraints.

Part 1: Domains of Constraint

Genetic Constraints

Environmental Constraints

Perceptual Constraints

Learning Constraints

Cultural Constraints

Categorisation Constraints

Part 2: Universal patterns are not evidence for innate constraints

Perceptual Warping

Embodied Relationships

Niche Construction

Universal Patterns are not Evidence for Innate Constraints

For the full dissertation and for references, go here.

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Language Evolution and Language Acquisition

The way children learn language sets the adaptive landscape on which languages evolve.  This is acknowledged by many, but there are few connections between models of language acquisition and models of language Evolution (some exceptions include Yang (2002), Yu & Smith (2007) and Chater & Christiansen (2009)).

However, the chasm between the two fields may be getting smaller, as theories are defined as models which are both more interpretable to the more technically-minded Language Evolutionists and extendible into populations and generations.

Also, strangely, models of word learning have been getting simpler over time.  This may reflect a move from attributing language acquisition to specific mechanisms towards a more general cognitive explanation.  I review some older models here, and a recent publication by Fazly et al.

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Language Evolution and Tetris! Part 2

Ok, so my previous experiment was an incredible failure.  The program crashed in sixteen different ways, including suddenly deciding not to respond to key presses for no apparent reason.  A rather lazy Ghost in The Shell.  Although about 8 people participated, the data was unusable.  What on earth was I trying to achieve?

The experiment was a typical human Iterated Learning experiment (e.g. Kirby, Cornish, Smith, 2008) – there were a set of meanings (Tetris blocks) which varied along two dimensions (shape and colour).  Participants were shown the words for half of the meanings, but then asked to recall words for each meanings.  These responses were then given to the next participant as input.  Over time, other such experiments result in meanings which are compositional and more learnable.  However, the meaning space tends to ‘collapse’ as the same label is applied to many meanings.

I was trying to do an iterated learning experiment which teased apart the difference between labelling a form and labelling a function.  If participants label the function of an object, the environment will play a greater role in the evolution of the language.

There were two chains –  one played Tetris where you have to complete lines to score points – colours are irrelevant.  The other chain played “Coltris” where you scored points by placing more than 4 blocks of the same colour next to each other.  Also, each individual block in a brick finds its own lowest point (i.e. the brick breaks apart), meaning that shape is much less important. That is, for Tetris, the functionally salient feature was shape while for Coltris it was colour.

What I was hoping was that, for the Tetris players, the signal space would ‘collapse’ in the colour dimension.  That is, labels would distinguish bricks by shape, but not colour.  For the Coltris, the opposite should have happened – labels would have distinguished bricks by colour but not shape.

Gary Lupyan has shown that naming categories of objects can affect your perception of those objects (Lupyan, G. (2008). The Conceptual Grouping Effect: Categories Matter (and named categories matter more). Cognition, 108, 566-577.).  My experiment looks into where those distinct category names came from in the first place.  Having said this, the experiment would have been more neat than illuminating.

Oh Well.

Marc Hauser investigated for scientific misconduct

The Boston Globe reported today that Marc Hauser is on leave due to scientific misconduct . The Great Beyond summarises the article as follows:

The trouble centers on a 2002 paper published in the journal Cognition (subscription required). Hauser was the first author on the paper, which found that cotton-top tamarins are able to learn patterns – previously thought to be an important step in language acquisition. The paper has been retracted, for reasons which are reportedly unclear even to the journal’s editor, Gerry Altmann.

Two other papers, a 2007 article in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and a 2007 Science paper, were also flagged for investigation. A correction has been published on the first, and Science is now looking into concerns about the second. And the Globe article highlights other controversies, including a 2001 paper in the American Journal of Primatology, which has not been retracted although Hauser himself later said he was unable to replicate the results. Findings in a 1995 PNAS paper were also questioned by an outside researcher, Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, who reviewed the original data and said he found “not a thread of compelling evidence” to support the paper’s conclusions.

Hauser has taken a year-long leave from the university.

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