118 posts · 100,533 views
A blog (mostly) dedicated to language, its evolution and anything else in-between.
Wintz
27 posts
Sean Roberts
65 posts
Hannah Little
0 posts
Michael
10 posts
Richard Littauer
0 posts
Kevin
1 post
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- May 2, 2013
- 03:29 PM
- 81 views
Gender, language and economic power: another spurious correlation
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
A recent paper finds a correlation between speaking a language with grammatical gender distinctions and the economic empowerment of women. Is this another case of a spurious correlation caused by historical accident?... Read more »
Victor Gay, Estefania Santacreu-Vasut and Amir Shoham. (2013) The Grammatical Origins of Gender Roles. Berkeley Economic History Laboratory (BEHL) Working Papers. info:/
- February 25, 2013
- 03:00 PM
- 384 views
Whorfian economics reconsidered: Why future tense?
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Keith Chen has found a link between people's economic decisions and whether their language has a future tense. But are there other linguistic variables that are even better at predicting economic decisions?... Read more »
Chen, M. (2011) The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets. SSRN Electronic Journal. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.1914379
Sean Roberts, & James Winters. (2012) Social Structure and Language Structure: the New Nomothetic Approach. Psycology of Language Learning, 16(2), 89-112. info:/10.2478/v10057-012-0008-6
- November 14, 2012
- 07:45 AM
- 183 views
Is ambiguity dysfunctional for communicatively efficient systems?
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Based on yesterday’s post, where I argued degeneracy emerges as a design solution for ambiguity pressures, a Reddit commentator pointed me to a cool paper by Piantadosi et al (2012) that contained the following quote: The natural approach has always been: Is [language] well designed for use, understood typically as use for communication? I think [...]... Read more »
Piantadosi, S., Tily, H., & Gibson, E. (2012) The communicative function of ambiguity in language. Cognition, 122(3), 280-291. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.004
- November 13, 2012
- 04:21 PM
- 207 views
Chocolate Consumption, Traffic Accidents and Serial Killers
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Last month there was a paper published about a correlation between chocolate consumption and Nobel Laureates. EDIT: I now see the article may not be accessible to everyone. Here’s a summary: Messerli suggests that, because some flavinoids that are found in chocolate have been linked to improved cognition, one might expect a country that eats [...]... Read more »
Messerli, F. (2012) Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates. New England Journal of Medicine, 367(16), 1562-1564. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMon1211064
- November 13, 2012
- 07:22 AM
- 188 views
Degeneracy emerges as a design feature in response to ambiguity pressures
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Two weeks ago my supervisor, Simon Kirby, gave a talk on some of the work that’s been going on in the LEC. Much of his talk focused on one of the key areas in language evolution research: the emergence of the basic design features that underpin language as a system of communication. He gave several [...]... Read more »
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
Edelman, G., & Gally, J. (2001) Degeneracy and complexity in biological systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(24), 13763-13768. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.231499798
Ay, N., Flack, J., & Krakauer, D. (2007) Robustness and complexity co-constructed in multimodal signalling networks. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1479), 441-447. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2006.1971
Eduardo G. Altmann, Janet B. Pierrehumbert, & Adilson E. Motter. (2010) Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups. PLoS ONE 6(5), e19009 (2011). arXiv: 1009.3321v2
Whitacre, J. (2010) Degeneracy: a link between evolvability, robustness and complexity in biological systems. Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, 7(1), 6. DOI: 10.1186/1742-4682-7-6
Mason, P. (2010) Degeneracy at Multiple Levels of Complexity. Biological Theory, 5(3), 277-288. DOI: 10.1162/BIOT_a_00041
- November 8, 2012
- 11:34 AM
- 157 views
Arguments against a “prometheus” scenario
by Hannah Little in A Replicated Typo 2.0
The Biological Origin of Linguistic Diversity: From some of the minds that brought you Chater et al. (2009) comes a new and exciting paper in PlosONE. Chater et al. (2009) used a computational model to show that biological adaptations for language are impossible because language changes too rapidly through cultural evolution for natural selection to [...]... Read more »
Baronchelli A, Chater N, Pastor-Satorras R, & Christiansen MH. (2012) The biological origin of linguistic diversity. PloS one, 7(10). PMID: 23118922
- October 31, 2012
- 06:54 AM
- 206 views
Taking the “icon” out of Emoticon
by Hannah Little in A Replicated Typo 2.0
For some years now Simon Garrod and Nicolas Fay, among others, have been looking at the emergence of symbolic graphical symbols out of iconic ones using communication experiments which simulate repeated use of a symbol. Garrod et al. (2007) use a ‘pictionary’ style paradigm where participants are to graphically depict one of 16 concepts without using [...]... Read more »
Garrod S, Fay N, Lee J, Oberlander J, & Macleod T. (2007) Foundations of representation: where might graphical symbol systems come from?. Cognitive science, 31(6), 961-87. PMID: 21635324
Yuki, M., Maddux, W., & Masuda, T. (2007) Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Cultural differences in using the eyes and mouth as cues to recognize emotions in Japan and the United States. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(2), 303-311. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2006.02.004
- October 3, 2012
- 05:49 PM
- 265 views
Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups (featuring @hanachronism and @richlitt)
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Last year Altmann, Pierrehumbert & Motter (henceforth, APM) released a great paper in PLoS One: Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups. Having referenced the paper extensively in my non-bloggy academic world, I thought it was about time I mentioned it on a Replicated Typo. Below is the abstract: Patterns of word [...]... Read more »
Altmann EG, Pierrehumbert JB, & Motter AE. (2011) Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups. PloS one, 6(5). PMID: 21589910
- October 3, 2012
- 02:00 PM
- 214 views
Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups (featuring @hanachronism and @richlitt)
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Last year Altmann, Pierrehumbert & Motter (henceforth, APM) released a great paper in PLoS One: Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups. Having referenced the paper extensively in my non-bloggy academic world, I thought it was about time I mentioned it on a Replicated Typo.... Read more »
Altmann EG, Pierrehumbert JB, & Motter AE. (2011) Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups. PloS one, 6(5). PMID: 21589910
- June 5, 2012
- 08:51 AM
- 367 views
Evolve a Band Name!
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
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? Click here to participate in our Band Name experiment. It takes about two minutes.... Read more »
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
- May 11, 2012
- 11:43 AM
- 476 views
Having more children affects your basic word order
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
The basic word order of your langauge (SOV or SVO) predicts the number of children you have.... Read more »
Sean Roberts, & James Winters. (2012) Constructing Knowledge: Nomothetic approaches to language evolution. Five Approaches to Language Evolution: Proceedings of the Workshops of the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language. info:/
Gell-Mann, M., & Ruhlen, M. (2011) The origin and evolution of word order. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(42), 17290-17295. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1113716108
- May 1, 2012
- 01:45 PM
- 573 views
Visualising language similarities without trees
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Gerhard Jäger uses lexostatistics to demonstrate that language similarities can be computed without using tree-based representations. On the way, he automatically derives a tree of phoneme similarity directly from word lists. The result is an alternative and intuitive look at how languages are related.... Read more »
Bakker, D., Müller, A., Velupillai, V., Wichmann, S., Brown, C., Brown, P., Egorov, D., Mailhammer, R., Grant, A., & Holman, E. (2009) Adding typology to lexicostatistics: A combined approach to language classification. Linguistic Typology, 13(1), 169-181. DOI: 10.1515/LITY.2009.009
- April 5, 2012
- 05:27 PM
- 593 views
The evolution of numeral classifier constructions
by Richard in A Replicated Typo 2.0
I went to a good talk almost a year ago at the Interfaces III conference at the University of Kent, and I said I’d write about it, but I never got around to it. The slides have been on my desktop ever since. Now that I have a couple hours to kill on the train [...]... Read more »
Vipas Pothipath. (2008) Typology and Evolution of Numeral-Noun Constructions. Unpublished PhD Thesis at the University of Edinburgh. info:/
- March 22, 2012
- 04:27 AM
- 574 views
The QHImp Qhallenge: Working memory in humans and Chimpanzees
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Is your memory better than a chimp's? Play our game and find out! We'll be analysing the data in real-time.... Read more »
Silberberg, A., & Kearns, D. (2008) Memory for the order of briefly presented numerals in humans as a function of practice. Animal Cognition, 12(2), 405-407. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-008-0206-8
Inoue, S., & Matsuzawa, T. (2007) Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees. Current Biology, 17(23). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2007.10.027
- March 21, 2012
- 04:28 AM
- 535 views
Evolang Coverage: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s plenary talk
by bodo in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Post by Bodo Winter: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s talk at this Evolang gave an impressively confident and forceful argument for linguistic nativism. The basic tenets of the Chomskyan view of language evolution were reiterated with some old and some new arguments along the way. Piattelli-Palmarini (P.P.) claimed that (1) language is modular and autonomous from other cognitive [...]... Read more »
Coates, M. (2003) Visual Ecology and Functional Morphology of Cubozoa (Cnidaria). Integrative and Comparative Biology, 43(4), 542-548. DOI: 10.1093/icb/43.4.542
Elman, J. (1991) Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks, and grammatical structure. Machine Learning, 7(2-3), 195-225. DOI: 10.1007/BF00114844
Garm, A., Ekström, P., Boudes, M., & Nilsson, D. (2006) Rhopalia are integrated parts of the central nervous system in box jellyfish. Cell and Tissue Research, 325(2), 333-343. DOI: 10.1007/s00441-005-0134-8
Ihlen, E., & Vereijken, B. (2010) Interaction-dominant dynamics in human cognition: Beyond 1/ƒα fluctuation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(3), 436-463. DOI: 10.1037/a0019098
Nilsson, D., Gislén, L., Coates, M., Skogh, C., & Garm, A. (2005) Advanced optics in a jellyfish eye. Nature, 435(7039), 201-205. DOI: 10.1038/nature03484
Palolahti, M., Leino, S., Jokela, M., Kopra, K., & Paavilainen, P. (2005) Event-related potentials suggest early interaction between syntax and semantics during on-line sentence comprehension. Neuroscience Letters, 384(3), 222-227. DOI: 10.1016/j.neulet.2005.04.076
- March 20, 2012
- 05:13 AM
- 591 views
Evolang coverage: More on linguistic replicators
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Monica Tamariz presented a poster at Evolang (runner up for the best poster award) about linguistic replicators. This is an alternative view to Andrew Smith's talk and Bill Benzon's post on the same subject. Below I've copied out sections of Tamariz's poster.... Read more »
Maye J, Werker JF, & Gerken L. (2002) Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition, 82(3). PMID: 11747867
- March 13, 2012
- 09:12 PM
- 770 views
So, what is it then, this Grammaticalization?
by Wintz in A Replicated Typo 2.0
A century ago Antoine Meillet, in his work L’évolution des Formes Grammaticales, coined the term grammaticalization to describe the process through which linguistic forms evolve from a lexical to a grammatical status. Even though knowledge of this process is found in earlier works by French and British philosophers (e.g. Condillac, 1746; Tooke, 1857), as well [...]... Read more »
Kurylowicz, J. (1965) The Evolution of Grammatical Categories. Diogenes, 13(51), 55-71. DOI: 10.1177/039219216501305105
- March 6, 2012
- 01:39 PM
- 710 views
Using tools from evolutionary biology in cultural evolution
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Levinson & Gray (2012) demonstrate how tools from evolutionary biology can help refine the way we look at human language and human cognition. Phylogenetic techniques allow researchers to properly control for the fact that languages are related by descent. More importantly, these tools allow the study of the full variation of linguistic structures, rather than assuming that the majority of linguistic structure is constrained by a limited set of Universal Grammar parameters. ... Read more »
Levinson, S., & Gray, R. (2012) Tools from evolutionary biology shed new light on the diversification of languages. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(3), 167-173. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.01.007
- February 29, 2012
- 09:31 AM
- 848 views
Cultural transmission in files
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
Two recent papers demonstrate that cultural evolution can be studied in the common fly.... Read more »
Ruedi Stoop, Patrick Nüesch, Ralph Lukas Stoop, Leonid Bunimovich. (2012) Fly out-smarts man. Populations and Evolution. info:/1202.5913v1
Battesti, M., Moreno, C., Joly, D., & Mery, F. (2012) Spread of Social Information and Dynamics of Social Transmission within Drosophila Groups. Current Biology, 22(4), 309-313. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.12.050
- February 27, 2012
- 08:43 AM
- 820 views
Evolang previews: Holistic or synthetic protolanguage: evidence from iterated learning of whistled signals
by Sean Roberts in A Replicated Typo 2.0
In this talk we will present results of an iterated learning experiment about the emergence of structure in sets of whistle sounds produced with a slide whistle. We will link these results to the debate on the nature of human protolanguage.... Read more »
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
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