Author: Sean

How old am I?

It’s my birthday!  But how old am I?  Well, that’s not such a straightforward question.  Even a seemingly well-defined concept such as age can be affected by cultural factors

First, my age in years is a bit of an estimate of the actual amount of time I’ve been alive, due to leap-years etc.  Second, a year is a culturally determined (although not all that arbitrary) amount of time.  But these are petty squabbles.

There are bigger differences.  For instance, there are cultural differences when it comes to the recall of birth dates.  And I’m not talking about saying you’re 24 when you’re 68.  Matched comparisons of age reporting in death certificates and census data found minimal differences for white Americans (Hill et al., 2000) but nearly half were inconsistent for African-Americans (Hill et al., 1997). These may be due to economic differences.

Furthermore, the definition of age can vary cross-culturally.  Knodel & Chyovan (1991) surveyed women between the ages of 15 and 49 in Thailand.  As well as finding that up to 20% reported an age that was more than one year different to their actual age, they surmised that most calculated their age as difference between the present year and the year of their birth, disregarding whether their birthday had passed.

 

So in some parts of the world I’ve been 26 for four months now, or was it 25?

 

Hill, M., Preston, S., Elo, I., & Rosenwaike, I. (1997). Age-Linked Institutions and Age Reporting among Older African Americans Social Forces, 75 (3) DOI: 10.2307/2580528

Hill, M., Preston, S., & Rosenwaike, I. (2000). Age Reporting among White Americans Aged 85+: Results of a Record Linkage Study Demography, 37 (2) DOI: 10.2307/2648119

Knodel J, & Chayovan N (1991). Age and birth date reporting in Thailand. Asian and Pacific population forum / East-West Population Institute, East-West Center, 5 (2-3) PMID: 12343437

Colour terms and national flags

I’m currently writing an article on the relationship between language and social features of the speakers who use it. As studies such as Lupyan & Dale (2010) have discovered, language structure is partially determined by social structure.  However, it’s also probable that many social features of a community are determined by its language.

Today, I wondered whether the number of basic colour terms a language has is reflected in the number of colours on its country’s flag. The idea being that a country’s flag contains colours that are important to its society, and therefore a country with more social tools for discussing colour (colour words) will be more likely to put more colours on its flag. It was a long shot, but here’s what I found:

The World Atlas of Language Structures has data on the number of basic colours in many languages (Kay & Maffi, 2008). Wikipedia has a list of country flags by the number of colours in them.  Languages with large populations (like English, Spanish etc.) were excluded.  It’s known that the number of basic colour terms correlates with latitude, so a partial correlation was carried out.  There was a small but significant relationship between the number of colour terms in a langauge and the number of colours on the flag where that language is spoken (r = 0.15, τ = 254, p=0.01, partial correlation, 2-tailed using Kendall’s tau).

Here’s the flag of Belize, where Garífuna is spoken (9-10 colours in the language, 12 colours on the flag):

Here is the flag of Nigeria where Ejagham is spoken (3-4 colours in the langauge, 2 colours on the flag):

Interestingly, the languages with the highest number of colours in their language and flag come from Central America while the majority of the languages with the lowest number of colours in their language and flag come from Africa.  Maybe there’s some cultural influence on neighbouring flags.

Update:

Here’s a boxplot, which makes more sense:

Also, I re-ran the analysis taking into account distance from the equator, speaker population and some properties of the nearest neighbour of each language (number of colours on flag and number of basic colours in langauge).  A multiple regression showed that the number of basic colours in a language is still a significant predictor of the number of colours in its national flag (r = 0.12, F(106,16)=1.8577, p= 0.03).  This analysis was done by removing languages with populations more than 2 standard deviations from the mean (9 languages out of 140).  The relationship is still significant with the whole dataset.

There are still problems with this analysis, of course.  For example, many of the languages in the data are minority languages which may have little impact on the national identity of a country.  Furthermore, the statistics may be compromised by multiple comparisons, since there may be a single flag for more than one language.  Also, a proper measure of the influence of surrounding languages would be better.  The nearest neighbour was supposed to be an approximation, but could be improved.

Lupyan G, & Dale R (2010). Language structure is partly determined by social structure. PloS one, 5 (1) PMID: 20098492

Kay, Paul & Maffi, Luisa. (2008). Number of Basic Colour Categories.In: Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew S. & Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 133.

Language as a board game

I’ve just finished reading The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks.  Yes, I’m a little behind the times for a geek.  Anyway, I was struck by the concept of Azad in the book.  The protagonist visits an Imperial civilisation whose whole society revolves around the playing of a board game called Azad.  Except this is a vastly complicated board game, played on multiple, football-field-sized boards with semi-conscious pieces and developed over thousands of years.  In fact, the game is so complicated that you can’t play it well unless your cognitive structures have been shaped by the game from a very young age.  Here’s a little extract:

Continue reading “Language as a board game”

Cultural inheritance in studies of artifical grammar learning

Recently, I’ve been attending an artificial language learning research group and have discovered an interesting case of cultural inheritance.  Arthur Reber was one of the first researchers to look at the implicit learning of grammar.  Way back in 1967, he studied how adults (quaintly called ‘Ss’ in the original paper) learned an artificial grammar, created from a finite state automata.  Here is the grand-daddy of artificial language learning automata:

Continue reading “Cultural inheritance in studies of artifical grammar learning”

The emergence of stable bilingualism in the lab: An experiment proposal

There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where interacting groups use several languages. In fact, by some estimates, bilingualism is the norm for most societies. If one views language as a tool for communicating about objects and events, it seems strange that linguistic diversity should be maintained over time for two reasons. First, it seems more efficient, during language use, to have a one-to-one mapping between signals and meanings. In fact, mutual exclusivity is exhibited by young children and has been argued to be an innate bias and crucial to the evolution of a linguistic system. How or why do bilinguals over-ride this bias? Secondly, learning two language systems must be more difficult than learning one. What is the motivation for expending extra effort on learning an apparently redundant system?

Despite these obstacles, stable bilingualism exists in many parts of the world.   How might these arise and be maintained?  Continue reading “The emergence of stable bilingualism in the lab: An experiment proposal”

Emergence of linguistic diversity in the lab

There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where linguistic diversity emerges and persists within groups of interacting individuals.  Previous research has identified the use of linguistic cues of identity as an important factor in the development of linguistic diversity (e.g. Nettle, 1999).  Gareth Roberts looks at this issue with an experimental paradigm.

This experiment was a game where individuals had to trade commodities in a series of rounds. At each round, individuals were paired up either with a team-mate or a competitor, though the speaker’s true identity was hidden.  Players were given random resources, but scored points based on how ‘balanced’ their resources were after trading (that is, you were punished for having much more meat than corn, for example).  A commodity given to another individual was worth twice as much to the receiver as to the donor.

Players could only interact through an ‘alien’ language via an instant-messaging system.  Prior to the game, individuals learned an artificial language which they were to use in these interactions. All participants were initially given the same starting language.  There were several conditions that manipulated the frequency with which you interacted with your team-mate and whether the task was competitive or co-operative.  In the co-operative condition, four players were considered as part of the same team and the task was to get a high a score as possible.  In the competitive condition the four players were split into two groups and the task was to score more than the other team.  In this condition, then, the main task was to identify whether your partner was a co-operator or a competitor.

The results showed that, if players interacted frequently enough with their team-mates and were in competition with another group, then linguistic diversity emerged.  Over the course of the game each team developed its own ‘variety’, and this was used as a marker of group identity. For example, in one game two forms of the word for ‘you’ arose.  Players in one team tended to use ‘lale’ while players in the other team tended to use ‘lele’, meaning that players could tell group membership from this variation.  Thus, linguistic variation arose due to the linguistic system evolving to encode the identity of the speakers.

The diversity seemed to arise both from drift and intentional change, both of which have been documented in the sociolinguistic literature.  Roberts suggests that linguistic markers make good social markers because they are costly to obtain (so difficult for free-riders to fake), salient and flexible enough to cope with changing group dynamics.  In the next post, I’ll be thinking about a similar experiment looking at how linguistic variation might arise in a co-operative scenario.

Roberts, G. (2010). An experimental study of social selection and frequency of interaction in linguistic diversity Interaction Studies, 11 (1), 138-159 DOI: 10.1075/is.11.1.06rob

Variation in Experiment Participant Applications

What do people expect when they sign up to a linguistics experiment?

I’m currently running an experiment and so I posted an ad for participants.  It simply states “You will take part in a linguistics experiment.  You will be paid £6.”, and gives my email.  I got 30 replies in a few hours, but was struck by the variation in the responses.  Here are some pointless graphs:

First, a look at the distribution of email subjects.  This reveals that most people know they are going to participate in an experiment, but fewer realise that they will contribute to research.  One person thought that they would be doing a “Research Study”.  What’s one of them?

However, here’s the killer.  Analysing the first lines of the emails, I noticed a distinct power law relationship between frequency and casualness.

People just don’t respect linguists any more.

And that’s why I make people do hours of mind-bending iterated learning experiments with spinning cats.

Special issue of Evolutionary Psychology on language evolution

The Journal of Evolutionary
Psychology has published its special issue on language evolution, and access is currently free.

Here’s the table of contents:

Evolutionary psychology and the origins of language (editorial)
Thomas C. Scott-Phillips

Review of geographic variation in terrestrial mammalian acoustic signals: Human speech variation in a comparative perspective
Adriano R. Lameira, Roberto A. Delgado and Serge A. Wich

Environment, methodology, and the object choice task in apes: Evidence for declarative comprehension and implications for the evolution of language
H. Lyn

Modelling vocal anatomy’s significant effect on speech
Bart de Boer

What exactly evolved?
A review of The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives , edited by Richard K. Larson, Viviane Déprez, Hiroko
Yamakido
Robert Truswell

A minimal approach is insufficient
A review of Language Evolution and Syntactic Theory by Anna R. Kinsella
Martin Edwardes

How language came to be?
A review of The Evolution of Language , by Tecumseh Fitch
Robin Dunbar

Erro Replicado

Replicated Typo is, as the name suggests, interested in transmission and change of cultural phenomena.  I’m also particularly interested in bilingualism.  That’s why I have to point out my recent discovery at Cognição, Linguagem e Música: A post by me, in Portuguese.

Well, more accurately, Pedro Lourenço Gomes has translated one of my recent articles.  It’s fascinating that some of my thoughts may reach people with whom I could not communicate directly.  Here’s an extract:

Original: There is a battle about to commence.  A battle in the world of cognitive modelling.  Or at least a bit of a skirmish.  Two articles to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences debate the merits of approaching cognition from different ends of the microscope.

Translation: Há uma batalha prestes a começar. Uma batalha no mundo da modelagem cognitiva. Ou pelo menos uma escaramuça. Dois artigos a serem publicados na Trends in Cognitive Sciences debatem os méritos de abordar a cognição a partir de lados diferentes do microscópio.

Just for comparison, here’s the original run through Google translate : Há uma batalha prestes a começar. Uma batalha no mundo da modelagem cognitiva. Ou pelo menos um pouco de uma escaramuça. Dois artigos que serão publicados no Trends in Cognitive Sciences debate o mérito de abordar a cognição de lados diferentes do microscópio.

Actually, it looks like Google translate has done an OK job, although I don’t know anything about Portuguese.  I had a look for more translations of Replicated Typo posts by searching for “Replicated Typo” with various language filters.  Alas, I could find nothing.

Cognição, Linguagem e Música looks like a great blog with reviews of books and articles and lots of posts about music.

Dog exhibits mutual exclusivity bias

Pilley & Reid (2010) describe an experiment where a border collie was trained to learn proper nouns for objects.  After 3 years of training, the dog had learned over 1,000 proper names and showed no sign of slowing.  Experiments were run to test whether the dog understood the difference between nouns and commands and whether the dog could learn words that represented categories of things.  Hot on the tail of Rico, another wonderdog, this provides striking evidence for word learning in non-primate species.

This dog has more toys than I did, including a weird levitating moose.

I liked some of the descriptions in the methodology section: “Upon successful retrieval of the item, Chaser was told ‘Good dog’.”.  There’s not nearly enough of this kind of encouragement in human experiments.  I also liked the fact that the authors posted videos with the article so you can see the experiments in action.

I’m especially interested in the mutual exclusivity experiment (although they call it ‘reasoning by exclusion’).  The dog was presented with a range of objects that the dog knew plus one unfamiliar object (how you find a toy that’s strikingly different to the other 1,000, I don’t know).  He was then asked to retrieve an object with an unfamiliar label.  Here’s the key paragraph:

Early in Chaser’s training, we corrected her immediately if she retrieved an incorrect object. As the result of this training, if she did not remember the name of an object, she would simply stand among all the objects without selecting one. Thus, on the first exclusion learning trial when she did not return with an object, a quick look revealed that she was simply standing among the objects. Only with repeated encouragements to fetch the newly named novel object, did she finally retrieve the novel object. Special encouragement was also necessary on the second replication. On the remaining six replications, she continued to retrieve novel objects successfully without further encouragement or error. Thus, Chaser was successful in eight successive replications, conducted over 8 days, in retrieving the novel objects.

Not the most clear-cut result, but the dog clearly got the idea that he was being asked for an object he had no label for.  However, it’s less clear whether the dog learned a new label in this way.  When asked to retrieve the new object with the new label immediately after the trial, the dog was successful.  However, success declined over time to well below chance after 24 hours.  Pilley & Reid suggest that positive feedback (e.g. a period of play with the toy whilst using the new label) is needed to form new word-object mappings.

Children exhibit mutual exclusivity, and can use it to learn new words.  However, this may be a learned process rather than an innate bias, because bilingual children do not reliably exhibit mutual exclusivity.  Chaser appeared to have a weak Mutual Exclusivity bias – he needed encouragement to fetch the novel object.  Learning did not occur as a process of the deduction, either.  It would be interesting to see this experiment done with a bilingual dog.  Maybe Chaser was bilingual already, with his own doggy-words for his gigantic mountain of toys.

Pilley JW, & Reid AK (2010). Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents. Behavioural processes PMID: 21145379