language – Page 3 – Replicated Typo

New Blog: A Rare Bite of Linguistics

Being someone who likes to welcome new academics blogs on the scene, particularly ones of a linguistic tilt, I urge you to go over, visit, read and maybe even leave a comment at A Rare Bite of Linguistics. It’s only one-post old, but the subject topic of language change and grammaticalisation fits in nicely with this blog’s overarching themes. As some of you might know, I wrote a bit about grammaticalisation at the start of this year, so the work is especially useful to lay folk such as myself. The post is the first of two that report the author’s findings of her MA project, which focused on the grammatical status of certainly in collocation with modal verbs. In the author’s own words:

My hypothesis is that the adverb is not fully grammaticalised even though it might show signatures of grammaticalisation.

Following Noël (2007), Bybee (2003) and Hopper and Traugott (2003) grammaticalisation affects a construction primarily and a single word secondarily; I suggest that, for modal synergy, a structural unit is formed of a modal verb and an adjacent modal adverb in mid-position, e.g. would certainly, must certainly etc. Mid-position is the ‘natural habitat’ of the modal particle and if there is grammaticalisation of certainly into a modal particle, this is consequently where we would expect to find it. Moreover, if this were a grammatical unit/construction consisting of two grammatical constituents, the grammaticality would lie in the bondedness (syntagmatic restriction) of the two elements, and the semantic and paradigmatic restrictions which are said to be part of grammaticalisation (cf. Lehmann’s parameters): we would expect an abstract meaning and perhaps reduced phonological properties (which I cannot test), paradigmaticity, low paradigmatic variability and high cohesion with modal verbs in general. Scope is a contested parameter and it seems that in this case too, we will deal with increased scope. Lastly, as Bybee (2003) indicated, frequency plays a staple role in the propagation of an item to becoming grammaticalised (see also Croft 2000).

It’s at quite a high level, but she does provide good, comprehensive definitions of what she’s studying and, more importantly, a fleshed out understanding of grammaticalisation theory and the processes underpinning it.

Neural Language Networks at Birth

I haven’t had chance to read this paper, but it throws up some interesting discussion points relating to this blog. In particular, it relates to a hypothesis I put forward last year on Domain-General Regions and Domain-Specific Networks. Here is the abstract:

The ability to learn language is a human trait. In adults and children, brain imaging studies have shown that auditory language activates a bilateral frontotemporal network with a left hemispheric dominance. It is an open question whether these activations represent the complete neural basis for language present at birth. Here we demonstrate that in 2-d-old infants, the language-related neural substrate is fully active in both hemispheres with a preponderance in the right auditory cortex. Functional and structural connectivities within this neural network, however, are immature, with strong connectivities only between the two hemispheres, contrasting with the adult pattern of prevalent intrahemispheric connectivities. Thus, although the brain responds to spoken language already at birth, thereby providing a strong biological basis to acquire language, progressive maturation of intrahemispheric functional connectivity is yet to be established with language exposure as the brain develops.

Paper Link: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/38/16056.short?rss=1

Does a Smart Phone make Smart Science?

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 ideal as your sample will not be representative of the population as a whole and will also be restricted as there is only so many participants that money and time will allow you to get into the lab to be tested.

This new research by Dufau et al. shows that the sampling limitations which laboratory experiments produce can be overcome by using smartphones. Using smart phone technology, data can be collected for cognitive science experiments from thousands of subjects from all over the world.

To illustrate how this can be done the authors carried out a large-scale study using iPhone and iPads. This was a linguistic study looking at people’s ability to distinguish words from similar non-words.

The project, which began in December 2010 has managed to collect data from 4,157 subjects in just 4 months! This can be compared with the English Lexicon Project which acquired a similar volume of data using traditional methods which took more than 3 years.

The data was collected using applications which were produced in seven languages (English, Basque, Catalan, Dutch, French, Malay, Spanish). Smartphones can also support studies in alphabets other than Roman including Chinese, Greek, and Japanese. This creates the opportunity to create large-scale cross linguistic studies without even having to move from behind your desk.

Whilst the example here is linguistic there is every reason that smart phones can be implemented in looking at how universal other areas of cognitive behaviour are. Or even neurosceince and experimental philosophy. I wonder if it would be possible to carry out experiments using transmission chains using smart phones.

However, I do worry that using things like iPhones will have the same problems as using things like mechanical turk, as it means that experimenters will not be able to make sure that participants are carrying out the tasks properly and removes quite a lot of control. Smartphones are also still a luxury and therefore only people within a certain socio-economic class will have smartphones, so maybe these methods may not reach such a wide audience, which seems to be why they’re being proposed in the first place.

The authors of the paper are hailing smartphones “a potential revolution in cognitive science” but only time will tell if this really kicks off!

Reference

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) : 10.1371/journal.pone.0024974

Stephen Fry’s Planet Word

Stephen Fry has embarked on a series of documentaries about language, beginning with the evolution of language which he calls ‘the final frontier’ of human understanding. The typical documentary hype is all here: Stephen Pinker sits in a gigantic fish tank with bits of taxidermied brain lying around like sandwiches; Michael Tomasello appears to live in a tropical primate enclose; Fry conducts his studies from a medieval study complete with quills, a CGI tree of languages and a talking parrot.

Despite this, it was actually a coherent and comprehensive review of topics in the field: Language versus communication in animals, phisological constraints of language, creativity and the desire to share information, the pragmatic origins of language, FoxP2 and the poverty of the stimulus. Bilingualism is even added to this cannon of interesting ways to approach the origins of language, somewhat tempered by Fry’s question “wouldn’t it be better if everybody spoke Esperanto?”.

Mercifully, Fry seems to be actually interested rather than trying to build up the conspiracy plot format endemic in other science documentaries. There are some odd diversions to a Klingon version of Hamlet, a trip to a German Christmas market and a slightly awkward re-enactment of a feral child case, but all in all the message is not objectionable: There is a graded difference between non-human and human communication, it’s partly genetic and partly cultural and languages continually change under pressures to be learned and to express new ideas. There are also welcome additions of the original Wug test and, of course, Fry & Laurie’s seminal sketch about language.

Overall, I’d say it was the second best documentary the BBC have made about the origins of language.

Here’s a clip:

Also a clip of Fry talking about the series:

Language is not necessary for analogy

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 with matching features. These baboons were able to match pairs which had matching features and pairs which had no matching features.

The study was run by Joël Fagot of the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (CNRS/Université de Provence) and Roger Thompson of the Franklin & Marshall College (United States).

It has been hypothesised in the past that finding relations between relations is an ability only accessible by language, but these new findings with baboons cast doubt on this assertion.

The experiments were carried out on 29 baboons. The baboons were first shown two shapes on a screen. The baboons then touched one of these shapes and two other pairs of shapes appeared on the screen. To be successful at the task the baboons had to touch the pair representing the same relation as the initial pair. So if the first pair matched in a feature the baboon had to choose the pair which also had a matching feature, and avoid the pair where there was no matching feature, in order to gain a reward. This shows the inherent abilities behind analogy.

6 baboons correctly performed the task after thousands of trials of training showing that it is definitely within the abilities of old world monkeys to resolve analogy problems.

The researchers also revisited the same baboons with the same task a year later and the monkeys were much quicker at acquiring the task showing that they remembered what to do.

These results show that language is not necessary for analogy and leaves questions as to what might make this ability adaptive.

Reference

Fagot J, & Thompson RK (2011). Generalized Relational Matching by Guinea Baboons (Papio papio) in Two-by-Two-Item Analogy Problems. Psychological science PMID: 21934135

Confrontational scavenging as a possible source for language and cooperation

New language/cooperation paper by Bickerton and Szathmáry today. What a dream team. The best news is that it’s open access. WOO! GO OPEN ACCESS!

Here’s the abstract:

The emergence of language and the high degree of cooperation found among humans seems to require more than a straightforward enhancement of primate traits. Some triggering episode unique to human ancestors was likely necessary. Here it is argued that confrontational scavenging was such an episode. Arguments for and against an established confrontational scavenging niche are discussed, as well as the probable effects of such a niche on language and co-operation. Finally, several possible directions for future research are suggested.

Here’s a link:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2148-11-261.pdf

Compositionality and Bilingualism

Last week I put up a link to an online experiment. Here’s the results! You can still do the experiment first, if you like, here. Source code and raw results at the bottom.

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.

These pressures include ones for learnability (compression) and expressivity (able to express a large variety of meanings, Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008). Bilingualism seems like an unlikely ability since learning an extra language leaves the speaker potentially no more expressive at a cost of an increase in the amount of effort required to learn it. There is no pressure for one language structure (e.g. English) to adapt to another language (e.g. Mandarin) so that they can become optimally learnable and expressive as a single medium. That is, there’s no reason to assume that expressivity and learnability pressures apply across languages (which are not being used by the same people).

Nevertheless, children display an aptitude and a willingness to learn and use multiple languages simultaneously, and at a similar rate to monolingual children. Therefore, languages do seem to have adapted to be learnable simultaneously. Does the compatibility of languages point to a strong innate property of language? In contrast, it might point to underlying similarity in the structure of languages, brought about by universal principles of communication.

Continue reading “Compositionality and Bilingualism”

A spin glass model of cultural consensus

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. I’m interested in whether there are situations in which it is rational to be bilingual and whether bilingualism is stable over long periods of time. Previous models suggest that bilingualism is not stable (e.g. Castello et al. 2007), therefore an irrational strategy (at least not a primary strategy), but these were based on locally rational learners.

This week we had a lecture from Simon DeDeo on system-wide timescales in the behaviour of macaques. He talked about Spin Glasses and rationality, which got me thinking. A Spin Glass is a kind of magnetised material where the ‘spin’ or magnetism (plus or minus) of the molecules does not reach a consensus, but flips about chaotically. This happens when the structure of the material creates ‘frustrated’ triangles where a molecule is trying to co-ordinate with other molecules with opposing spins, making it difficult to resolve the tensions. Long chains of interconnected frustrated triangles can cause system-wide flips on the order of hours or days and are difficult to study both in models (Ising model) and in the real world.

Continue reading “A spin glass model of cultural consensus”

Cultural Evolution and the Impending Singularity: The Movie

Here’s a video of a talk I gave at the Santa Fe Institute‘s Complex Systems Summer School (written with roboticist Andrew Tinka-check out him talking about his fleet of floating robots). The talk was a response to the “Evolution Challenge”:

Has Biological Evolution come to an end?
Is belief an emergent property?
Will advanced computers use H. Sapiens as batteries?

I also blogged about a part of this talk here (why a mad scientist’s attempt at creating A.I. to make new scientific discoveries was doomed).

The talk was given a prise for best talk by the judging panel which included David Krakauer, Tom Carter and best-selling author Cormac McCarthy. At several points in the talk, I completely forget what I was supposed to say because the people filming the event asked me to set my screen up in a way so I couldn’t see my notes.

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

Ackley, D.H., and Cannon, D.C.. “Pursue Robust Indefinite Scalability”. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HOTOS-XIII) (2011, May). Abstract, PDF.

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

Sonority and Sex: Why smaller communities are louder

Through this post on Sprogmuseet about Atkinson’s analysis of the out of Africa hypothesis, I found an article by Ember & Ember (2007) (who also quantified the link between colour lexicon size and distance from the equator, see my post here) on Sonority and climate. The article extends work by Fought et al. (2004) which finds that a language’s sonority is related to climate. Sonority is a measure of amplitude (loudness) as is greater for vowels than for consonants (for example, see here). Basically, the warmer the climate, the greater the sonority of the phoneme inventory of the population. The theory is that “people in warmer climates generally spend more time outdoors and communicate at a distance more often than people in colder climates”.

Continue reading “Sonority and Sex: Why smaller communities are louder”