Author: Sean

The deadline for the 2nd XLanS conference on Triggers of Change in the Language Sciences has extended its submission deadline to June 14th.

This year’s topic is ‘triggers of change’:  What causes a sound system or lexicon or grammatical system to change?  How can we explain rapid changes followed by periods of stability?  Can we predict the direction and rate of change according to external influences?

We have also added two new researchers to our keynote speaker list, which now stands as:

• Michael C. Gavin (Colorado State University)
• Olivier Morin (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)
• Monica Tamariz (Heriot Watt University)
• Sarah Thomason (University of Michigan)
• Brigitte Pakendorf (University of Lyon)
• Márton Sóskuthy (University of York)

A new paper by Anita Slonimska and myself attempts to link global tendencies in the lexicon to constraints from turn taking in conversation.

Question words in English sound similar (who, why, where, what …), so much so that this class of words are often referred to as wh-words. This regularity exists in many languages, though the phonetic similarity differs, for example:

In her Master’s thesis, Anita suggested that these similarities help conversation flow smoothly.  Turn taking in conversation is surprisingly swift, with the usual gap between turns being only 200ms.  This is even more surprising when one considers that the amount of time it takes to retrieve, plan and begin pronouncing one word is 600ms.  Therefore, speakers must begin planning what they will say before current speaker has finished speaking (as demonstrated by many recent studies, e.g. Barthel et al., 2017). Starting your turn late can be interpreted as uncooperative, or lead to missing out on a chance to speak.

Perhaps the harshest environment for turn-taking is answering a content question.  Responders must understand the question, retrieve the answer, plan their utterance and begin speaking.  It makes sense to expect that cues would evolve to help responders recognise that a question is coming.  Indeed there are many paralinguistic cues, such as rising intonation (even at the beginning of sentences) and eye gaze.  Another obvious cue is question words, especially when they appear at the beginning of question sentences. Slonimska hypothesised that wh-words sound similar in order to provide an extra cue that a question is about to be asked, so that the speaker can begin preparing their turn early.

We tried to test this hypothesis, firstly by simply asking whether wh-words really do have a tendency to sound similar within languages.  We combined several lexical databases to produce a word list for 1000 concepts in 226 languages, including question words.  We found that question words are:

• More similar within languages than between languages
• More similar than other sets of words (e.g. pronouns)
• Often composed of salient phonemes

Of course, there are several possible confounds, such as languages being historically related, and many wh-words being derived from other wh-words within a language. We attempted to control for this using stratified permutation, excluding analysable forms, and comparing wh words to many other sets of words such as pronouns which are subject to the same processes.  Not all languages have similar-sounding wh-words, but across the whole database the tendancy was robust.

Another prediction is that the wh-word cues should be more useful if they appear at the beginning of question sentences.  We tested this using typological data on whether wh-words appear in initial position.  While the trend was in the right direction, the result was not significant when controlling for historical and areal relationships.

Despite this, we hope that our study shows that it is possible to connect constraints from turn taking to macro-level patterns across languages, and then test the link using large corpora and custom methods.

Anita will be presenting an experimental approach to this question at this year’s CogSci conference.  We show that /w,h/ is a good predictor of questions in real English conversations, and that people actually use /w,h/ to help predict that a question is coming up.

Slonimska, A., & Roberts, S. G. (2017). A case for systematic sound symbolism in pragmatics: Universals in wh-words. Journal of Pragmatics, 116, 1-20. Article.  PDF.

All data and scripts are available in this github repository.

A new paper by Monica Tamariz, myself, Isidro Martínez and Julio Santiago uses an iterated learning paradigm to investigate the emergence of iconicity in the lexicon.  The languages were mappings between written forms and a set of shapes that varied in colour, outline and, importantly, how spiky or round they were.

We found that languages which begin with no iconic mapping develop a bouba-kiki relationship when the languages are used for communication between two participants, but not when they are just learned and reproduced.  The measure of the iconicity of the words came from naive raters.

Here’s one of the languages at the end of a communication chain, and you can see that the labels for spiky shapes ‘sound’ more spiky:

These experiments were actually run way back in 2013, but as is often the case, the project lost momentum.  Monica and I met last year to look at it again, and we did some new analyses.  We worked out whether each new innovation that participants created increased or decreased iconicity.  We found that new innovations are equally likely to result in higher or lower iconicity: mutation is random.  However, in the communication condition, participants re-used more iconic forms: selection is biased.  That fits with a number of other studies on iconicity, including Verhoef et al., 2015 (CogSci proceedings) and Blasi et al. (2017).

Matthew Jones, Gabriella Vigliocco and colleagues have been working on similar experiments, though their results are slightly different.  Jones presented this work at the recent symposium on iconicity in language and literature (you can read the abstract here), and will also present at this year’s CogSci conference, which I’m looking forward to reading:

Jones, M., Vinson, D., Clostre, N., Zhu, A. L., Santiago, J., Vigliocco, G. (forthcoming). The bouba effect: sound-shape iconicity in iterated and implicit learning. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Our paper is quite short, so I won’t spend any more time on it here, apart from one other cool thing:  For the final set of labels in each generation we measured iconicity using scores from nieve raters, but for the analysis of innovations we had hundreds of extra forms.  We used a random forest to predict iconicity ratings for the extra labels from unigrams and bigrams of the rated labels.  It accounted for 89% of the variance in participant ratings on unseen data.  This is a good improvement over some old techniques such as using the average iconicity of the individual letters in the label, since random forests allows the weighting of particular letters to be estimated from the data, and also allows for non-linear effects when two letters are combined.

However, it turns out that most of the prediction is done by this simple decision tree with just 3 unigram variables. Shapes were rated as more spiky if they contained a ‘k’, ‘j’ and ‘z’ (our experiment was run in Spanish):

So the method was a bit overkill in this case, but might be useful for future studies.

All data and code for doing the analyses and random forest prediction is available in the supporting information of the paper, or in this github repository.

Tamariz, M., Roberts, S. G., Martínez, J. I. and Santiago, J. (2017), The Interactive Origin of Iconicity. Cogn Sci. doi:10.1111/cogs.12497,  [pdf from MPI]

Back in March 2014, Hedvig Skirgård and I wrote a post about the Great Language Game.  Today we’ve published those results in PLOS ONE, together with the Game’s creator Lars Yencken.

One of the fundamental principles of linguistics is that speakers that are separated in time or space will start sound different, while speakers who interact with each other will start to sound similar.  Historical linguists have traced the diversification of languages using objective linguistic measurements, but so far there has never been a widespread test of whether languages further away on a family tree or more physically distant from each other actually sound different to human listeners.

An opportunity arose to test this in the form of The Great Language Game: a web-based game where players listen to a clip of someone talking and have to guess which language is being spoken.  It was played by nearly one million people from 80 countries, and so is, as far as we know, the biggest linguistic experiment ever.  Actually, this is probably my favourite table I’ve ever published (note the last row):

We calculated the probability of confusing any of the 78 languages in the Great Language Game for any of the others (excluding guesses about a language if it was an official language of the country the player was in).  Players were good at this game – on average getting 70% of guesses correct.

Using partial Mantel tests, we found that languages are more likely to be confused if they are:

The University of Lyon 2 is proud to announce ‘Triggers of Language Change in the Language Sciences’.

October 11th-14th 2017, University of Lyon, France.

See the website for our call for papers and further details.

It’s International Women’s day!  Language Evolution is a largely male dominated discipline: women account for only 8 out of the top 100 most cited authors, and only 14 out of 82 invited speakers at the Evolution of Language Conference (see here).  To promote the contribution of women to our field, we’ve compiled a list of 100 female researchers in language evolution.

The list is by no means exhaustive, and is largely based on attendance at the most recent EvoLang conference.  Topics cover both language origins and evolutionary approaches to linguistics more generally.  A recent paper by each author is also included, though it may not be the best representation of their work.  All mistakes with regards to links and citations are my own.

Adele E. Goldberg

Goldberg, A. E. (2015). Subtle implicit language facts emerge from the functions of constructions. Frontiers in psychology, 6.

Alexandra Carstensen

Amy Bauernfeind

Bauernfeind AL, Soderblom EJ, Turner ME, Moseley MA, Ely JJ, Hof PR, Sherwood CC, Wray GA, Babbitt CC. Evolutionary divergence of gene and protein expression in the brains of humans and chimpanzees. Genome Biology and Evolution. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evv132

Amy Perfors

A Perfors (in press). On simplicity and emergence: Commentary on Johnson (2016) Psychonomic Bulletin and Review: Special issue on language evolution

Andrea Claude

Calude, A & Verkerk, A. (2016). How to build the Number Line in Indo-European – a Phylogenetic Study. Journal of Language Evolution [link]

Andreea Geambasu

Geambașu A., Ravigniani A. & Levelt C.C. (2016), Preliminary Experiments on Human Sensitivity to Rhythmic Structure in a Grammar with Recursive Self-Similarity, Frontiers in Neuroscience 10.

Anna Jon-And

Jon-And (2016) Modeling language change triggered by language shift. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Anna Maria Di Sciullo

Sciullo (2016) Emergent syntax and syntactic variation. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Anne Kandler

Kandler, A., Wilder, B., & Fortunato, L. (2017). Inferring individual-level processes from population-level patterns in cultural evolution. bioRxiv, 111575.

Annemarie Verkerk

Calude, A & Verkerk, A. (2016). How to build the Number Line in Indo-European – a Phylogenetic Study. Journal of Language Evolution [link]

Anu Vastenius

(2016) Constituent order in pictorial representations of events is influenced by language. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Ashley Micklos

Micklos (2016) Interaction for facilitating conventionalization: negotiating the silent gesture communication of noun-verb pairs. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Asifa Majid

Majid, A., Jordan, F., & Dunn, M. (2015). Semantic systems in closely related languages.

Brenda McCowan

Beisner, B. A., Hannibal, D. L., Finn, K. R., Fushing, H., & McCowan, B. (2016). Social power, conflict policing, and the role of subordination signals in rhesus macaque society. American journal of physical anthropology.

Bridget Samuels

Samuels, B. D. (2015). Can a bird brain do phonology?. Frontiers in psychology, 6.

Brigitte Pakendorf

Pakendorf, B. (2014). Coevolution of languages and genes. Current opinion in genetics & development, 29, 39-44.

Buddhamas Kriengwatana

Kriengwatana (2016) A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? evidence in humans and songbirds. . The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Camilla Power

Power, C., Finnegan, M., & Callan, H. (2016). Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology.

Carmen Saldana

(2016) The cultural evolution of complexity in linguistic structure. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Carol Padden

Padden, C., Meir, I., Aronoff, M. and Sandler, W. (in press) The grammar of space in two new sign languages. In D. Brentari (Ed.), Sign Languages: A Cambridge Survey. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Catherine Hobaiter

Hobaiter, C., Poisot, T., Zuberbühler, K., Hoppitt, W., & Gruber, T. (2014). Social network analysis shows direct evidence for social transmission of tool use in wild chimpanzees. PLoS Biol, 12(9), e1001960.

Catriona Silvey

Silvey, C., Kirby, S., & Smith, K. (2015). Word meanings evolve to selectively preserve distinctions on salient dimensions. Cognitive Science, 39(1), 212-226.

Cecilia Heyes

Heyes, C. (2016). Blackboxing: social learning strategies and cultural evolution. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 371(1693), 20150369.

Chiara Barbieri

Barbieri, C., Güldemann, T., Naumann, C., Gerlach, L., Berthold, F., Nakagawa, H., … & Pakendorf, B. (2014). Unraveling the complex maternal history of Southern African Khoisan populations. American journal of physical anthropology, 153(3), 435-448.

Christina Behme

Behme, C. (2015). Is the ontology of biolinguistics coherent?. Language Sciences, 47, 32-42.

Christine Caldwell

Caldwell CA, Atkinson M & Renner E (2016) Experimental approaches to studying cumulative cultural evolution, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25 (3), pp. 191-195.

Christine Cuskley

Cuskley, C., Simner, J. and Kirby, S. (2015). Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba-kiki effect. Psychological Research, doi: 10.1007/s00426-015-0709-2.

Claire Bowern

Colleen Reichmuth

Reichmuth, C., & Casey, C. (2014). Vocal learning in seals, sea lions, and walruses. Current opinion in neurobiology, 28, 66-71.

Cory Cuthbertson

(2016) Empirically assessing linguistic ability with stone tools. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Dean Falk

Falk, D. (2016). Evolution of Brain and Culture. Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 94, 1.

Deborah Kerr

(2016) The spontaneous emergence of linguistic diversity in an artificial language. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Dedre Gentner

Gentner, D. (2016). Language as cognitive tool kit: How language supports relational thought. American Psychologist, 71(8), 650.

Diane Reiss

Maust-Mohl, M., Soltis, J., & Reiss, D. (2015). Acoustic and behavioral repertoires of the hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius). The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 138(2), 545-554.

Ekaterina Abramova

(2016) Triadic ontogenetic ritualization: an overlooked possibility. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Elizabeth Irvine

Irvine (2016) Deictic tools can limit the emergence of referential symbol systems. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Emilia Garcia-Casademont

Garcia-Casademont, E. (2017). A Case Study in the Emergence of Recursive Phrase Structure. In First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015 (pp. 333-336). Springer, Cham.

Emily Morgan

(2016) Frequency-dependent regularization in iterated learning. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Erica Cartmill

Cartmill, E. A., Hunsicker, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Pointing and naming are not redundant: Children use gesture to modify nouns before they modify nouns in speech. Developmental psychology, 50(6), 1660.

Esther Clarke

Clarke, E., Reichard, U. H., & Zuberbühler, K. (2015). Context-specific close-range “hoo” calls in wild gibbons (Hylobates lar). BMC evolutionary biology, 15(1), 56.

Eva Zehentner

(2016) A game theoretic account of semantic subjectification in the cultural evolution of languages. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Evelina Fedorenko

Piantadosi, S. T., & Fedorenko, E. (2016). Infinitely productive language can arise from chance under communicative pressure.

Federica Cavicchio

Cavicchio (2016) Are emotional displays an evolutionary precursor to compositionality in language?. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Fiona Jordan

Jordan, FM & Huber, B, 2013, ‘Evolutionary approaches to cross-cultural anthropology’. Cross-Cultural Research, vol 47., pp. 91-101

Florencia Reali

Reali, F., Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. H. (2014, March). The paradox of linguistic complexity and community size. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG X). Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd (pp. 270-279).

Francesca Tria

Tria (2016) Modeling the emergence of creole languages. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Gabriella Vigliocco

Vigliocco, G., Perniss, P., & Vinson, D. (2014). Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution.

Hannah Cornish

Hannah Haynie

Hannah Little

(2016) Emergence of signal structure: effects of duration constraints. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Heidi Lyn

Lyn, H. (2017). The question of capacity: Why enculturated and trained animals have much to tell us about the evolution of language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(1), 85-90.

Hope Morgan

(2016) The effect of modality on signal space in natural languages. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Irene Pepperberg

Pepperberg, I. M. (2016). Animal language studies: What happened? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Psychon Bull Rev. doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1101-y

Irit Meir

Meir, I., Aronoff, M., Börstell, C., Hwang, S. O., Ilkbasaran, D., Kastner, I., … & Sandler, W. (2017). The effect of being human and the basis of grammatical word order: Insights from novel communication systems and young sign languages. Cognition, 158, 189-207.

Janet Mann

Mann, J., & Singh, L. (2015). Culture, Diffusion, and Networks in Social Animals. Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource.

Jasmeen Kanwal

(2016) The evolution of Zipf’s law of abbreviation. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Jennifer Culbertson

Culbertson, J., & Newport, E. L. (2015). Harmonic biases in child learners: In support of language universals. Cognition, 139, 71-82.

Jesse Snedeker

Kocab, A., Senghas, A., & Snedeker, J. (2016). The emergence of temporal language in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition, 156, 147-163.

Jiani Chen

Chen, J., & ten Cate, C. (2015). Zebra finches can use positional and transitional cues to distinguish vocal element strings. Behavioural processes, 117, 29-34.

Joan Bybee

Bybee, Joan. Language change. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Joanna Bryson

Bryson, J.J. (2007). Embodiment vs. Memetics. Mind & Society, 7(1):77-94. [Link]

Kate Arnold

Arnold, K & Zuberbuehler, K 2013, ‘Female putty-nosed monkeys use experimentally altered contextual information to disambiguate the cause of male alarm calls’ PLoS One, vol 8, no. 6, e65660. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0065660

Kathleen Dudzinski

Dudzinski, K., & Frohoff, T. (2014). Dolphin mysteries: Unlocking the secrets of communication. Yale University Press.

Katie Collier

(2016) Dwarf mongooses combine meaningful alarm calls. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Katie Slocombe

Fedurek, P., & Slocombe, K. E. (2011). Primate vocal communication: a useful tool for understanding human speech and language evolution?. Human Biology, 83(2), 153-173.

Kim Bard

Bard, K. A. (2016). Dyadic interactions, attachment and the presence of triadic interactions in chimpanzees and humans. Infant Behavior and Development.

Kirsty Graham

(2016) Intentional meaning of bonobo gestures. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Lilia Rissman

Rissman (2016) Strategies in gesture and sign for demoting an agent: effects of language community and input . The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Ljiljana Progovac

Progovac, L. (2016) A gradualist scenario for language evolution: Precise linguistic reconstruction of early human (and Neandertal) grammars. Frontiers in Psychology 2016

Limor Raviv

Raviv, L., & Arnon, I. (2016). Language evolution in the lab: The case of child learners. In A. Papagrafou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, & J. Trueswell (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2016). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1643-1648). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Lynn Perry

Perry (2016) Early learned words are more iconic. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Madza Farias-Virgens

(2016) Evolution of convergent transcriptional specializations in the brains of humans and song-learning birds. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Maggie Tallerman

Tallerman M. Can the integration hypothesis account for language evolution?. Journal of Neurolinguistics 2016, (ePub ahead of Print).

Marie Montant

Montant (2016) Make new with old: human language in phylogenetically ancient brain regions. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Marieke Schouwstra

Schouwstra, M. (2016). Temporal Structure in Emerging Language: From Natural Data to Silent Gesture. Cognitive Science.

Marieke Woensdregt

(2016) The cultural co-evolution of language and mindreading. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Marlen Fröhlich

Fröhlich, M.; Müller, G.; Zeiträg, C.; Wittig, R. M.; Pika, S.: Gestural development of chimpanzees in the wild: the impact of interactional experience. Animal Behaviour (2017)

Megan Broadway

(2016) Signature whistles in an introduction context. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Michelle Spierings

(2016) Rule learning in birds: zebra finches generalize by positional similarities, budgerigars by the structural rules.. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Molly Flaherty

Flaherty (2016) Do lab attested biases predict the structure of a new natural language? The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Molly Lewis

Lewis, M. & Frank, M. C. (2016). The length of words reflects their conceptual complexity. Cognition. 153, 182-195.

Monica Tamariz

Tamariz, M., & Kirby, S. (2016). The cultural evolution of language. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 37-43.

Monika Pleyer

Pleyer, M. & Pleyer, M. (2016). The Evolution of Im/politeness. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Mutsumi Imai

Imai, M., Kanero, J., & Masuda, T.(2016). The Relation between Language, Culture and Thought. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 70–77.

Natalie Sebanz

Milward, S. J., & Sebanz, N. (2016). Mechanisms and development of self–other distinction in dyads and groups. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 371(1686), 20150076.

Nicky Clayton

Clayton, N. S. (2015). Ways of thinking: from crows to children and back again. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68(2), 209-241.

Oksana Tkachman

(2016) Arbitrariness of iconicity: the sources (and forces) of (dis)similarities in iconic representations . The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Olga Feher

Fehér, O., Ljubicic, I., Suzuki, K., Okanoya, K. & Tchernichovski, O. (2017). Statistical learning in songbirds: from self-tutoring to song culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0053.

Olga Vasileva

(2016) Language evolution in ontogeny and phylogeny. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Pamela Perniss

Perniss, P., & Vigliocco, G. (2014). The bridge of iconicity: from a world of experience to the experience of language. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 369(1651), 20130300.

Piera Filippi

Filippi (2016) Humans recognize vocal expressions of emotional states universally across species. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Rebecca Grollemund

Grollemund, R., Branford, B., Bostoen, K., Meade, A., Venditti, C. & Pagel, M. (2015). Bantu expansion shows habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 112:43, pp. 13296-13301. [link]

Rie Asano

(2016) On a music-ready brain: neural basis, mechanisms, and their contribution to the language evolution. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Rose Stamp

Stamp (2016) The grammar of the body and the emergence of complexity in sign languages. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Ruth Sonnweber

Sonnweber, R., Ravignani, A., & Fitch, W. T. (2015). Non-adjacent visual dependency learning in chimpanzees. Animal cognition, 18(3), 733-745.

Sabine van der Ham

(2016) Catergory learning in audition, touch, and vision. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Sabrina Engesser

(2016) Meaningful call combinations and compositional processing in a social bird. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Sarah Hrdy

Hrdy, S. B. (2016). Development plus social selection in the emergence of “emotionally modern” humans. Childhood: Origins, Evolution, and Implications, 11.

Sharon Thompson-Schill

Fedorenko, E., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2014). Reworking the language network. Trends in cognitive sciences, 18(3), 120-126.

Shiri Lev-Ari

Lev-Ari, S., & Peperkamp, S. (2017). Language for $200: Success in the environment influences grammatical alignment. Journal of Language Evolution. Advance online publication. doi:10.1093/jole/lzw012

Simone Pika

Fröhlich, M.; Müller, G.; Zeiträg, C.; Wittig, R. M.; Pika, S.: Gestural development of chimpanzees in the wild: the impact of interactional experience. Animal Behaviour (2017)

Sonia Harmand

Lewis, Jason E., and Sonia Harmand. “An earlier origin for stone tool making: implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 371.1698 (2016): 20150233.

Sonja Vernes

Vernes, S. C. (2016). What bats have to say about speech and language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Advance online publication. doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1060-3

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Goldin-Meadow, S., & Yang, C. (2016). Statistical evidence that a child can create a combinatorial linguistic system without external linguistic input: Implications for language evolution. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Tessa Verhoef

Verhoef (2016) Iconicity, naturalness and systematicity in the emergence of sign language structure. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Vanessa Ferdinand

Ferdinand (2016) Word learners regularize synonyms and homonyms similarly. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Vera Kempe

Wendy Sandler

Sandler, Wendy (to appear). What Comes First in Language Emergence? In N. Enfield (Ed.). Dependencies in Language: On the Casual Ontology of Linguistic Systems. Language Science Press, Studies in Diversity Linguistics Series.

Yasamin Motamedi

(2016) Linguistic structure emerges in the cultural evolution of artificial sign languages. The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

Zanna Clay

Clay (2016) Functionally flexible vocalizations in wild bonobos (pan pansicus). The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11)

In a new paper in the Journal of Language Evolution, Tessa Verhoef and I analyse reviewer ratings for papers submitted to the EvoLang conference between 2012 and 2016 .  In the most recent conference, we trialed double-blind review for the first time, and we wanted to see if hiding the identity of authors revealed any biases in reviewers’ ratings.

We found that:

• Proportionately few papers are submitted from female first authors.
• In single-blind review, there was no big difference in average ratings for papers by male or female first authors …
• … but female first-authored papers were rated significantly higher than male first authored papers in the double-blind condition.

There are many possible explanations of these findings, but they are indicative of a bias against female authors.  This fits with a wider literature of gender biases in science.  We suggest that double-blind review is one tool that can help reduce the effects of gender biases, but does not tackle the underlying problem directly.  We were pleased to see better representation of women on the most recent EvoLang talks and plenary speaker list, and look forward to making our field more inclusive.

The paper is available, free and open-access, at the Journal of Language Evolution.  The data and statistical code is also available on github.

I’ll be appearing at Nineworlds convention as part of Stephanie Rennick’s panel on “Lessons for Academia from Computer Games”.  The idea is to talk about ways in which games have informed our research, and here’s some of the things I’ll mention:

Minecraft shows us how language evolved

How were the very first languages created?  How do you agree on words for things if you don’t have a language yet?  The accepted theory is people point at stuff they need and invent a word for it at the same time.  After many rounds of negotiation, people come to a consensus about how to describe things.  We tried to simulate this in Minecraft by getting people to build a little house together, but they could only communicate by knocking on the table.  But what we found was that, if you gave people the ability to point at things, they could do the task perfectly well without inventing a communication system at all.  This was quite surprising, and suggests that language did not originate as a simple way of requesting things, but maybe as a way of referring to stuff that you can’t easily point to, like the future or emotions.  More here

A chimp playing a computer game shows us we have flexible brains

Ayumu is a chimpanzee who plays computer games, and they’re REALLY GOOD.  In a game where you have to memorise the location of numbers on a screen, they left human participants in the dust (there’s a fun video of this).  The original researchers concluded that there was a genetic difference between us and chimpanzees:  Chimps had evolved better visual memory for hunting, and we evolved better auditory memory for speaking.  However, we wondered if Ayumu could beat experienced gamers.  We set up a ‘Chimp Challenge’ online where people could play the game.  We found over 60 people who were as good as Ayumu.  This suggests that the difference is also due to our experience – humans have very flexible brains that can get good at a lot of different things. More here.

Computer games can help us learn about linguistic diversity

Linguists are great at spotting differences between languages, but we don’t actually know very much about what differences matter most to people.  We explored “the great language game” – an online game where you have to name the language being spoken in a recording.  Looking at 15 million results, we found that the more different languages were, the easier people could tell them apart.  But we also found that people confused some languages that linguists would consider extremely different, and also that there were differences depending on the languages you know.  We suggest that how you experience a foreign language is linked to you cultural knowledge and beliefs.  We took this one step further by creating an updated version of the game with some very rare languages, which we hope to analyse in the future.  More here.

The proceedings of the 11th Evolution of Language conference are now available to buy as a physical book.

The book is available through print-on-demand publisher Lulu for £23.72.  This is the lowest price allowed by the site, and will provide EvoLang with £2.81 for each sale.  The book now also has an ISBN: 978-1-326-61450-8.

This book is being made available due to popular demand, but all the papers and abstracts are freely available from the proceedings website, which is the canonical source.  Unfortunately, the costs were too great to publish in colour, so the inside of the book is black and white.

Buy the book now!