Today we had a talk by the author and translator Allan Cameron on his new book ‘In Praise of the Garrulous‘. In it, he sings the praise of ‘Garrulousness’ or talkativeness, and rejects the idea that human languages were initially homogeneous. Indeed, he claimed that monolingualism is not our natural state, but we are designed to handle multiple languages, dialects and registers.
He also talked about the idea that there is a trade-off between linguistic diversity and the ability of a society to accumulate knowledge through technologies such as writing. Although he did acknowledge that some systems (e.g. Chinese) protect linguistic diversity by transcending exact phonetic representation.
The talk was illustrated by a wide range of sources – literary and historical – including the role of the printing industry in Venice on the standardisation and spread of modern day Italian. The book promises to be an interesting approach to language evolution that takes into account many aspects that current scientific researchers leave out such as how power and war influence how languages change.
A recent episode of Futurama – ‘A clockwork Origin‘ – sees the Professor go head to head with Creationists, and makes a good point about the difference between Creationism and Evolution.
After his work on the origin of man is mocked, the Professor decides to leave Earth for a desolate planet. However, the nano-bots which he designs to purify the water evolve overnight into a full-scale ecosystem, complete with robo-dinosaurs that are eventually wiped out by a solar flare.
At first, the Professor is unwilling to see the change in the robots as Evolution, saying ‘Those robots didn’t evolve by themselves, I put them there – I’m a genius, get over it’. However, after the crew is captured by robo-anthropologists (anthrobopologists?), he’s forced to admit that they really have Evolved. Further, he’s forced to admit that he has no problem with the idea of a creator playing a small part in the origins of Humans, just as he started the race of robots.
This is all good news for those studying Cultural Evolution – people are coming round to the idea that Evolution is an abstract process rather than the theory of how humans evolved from apes. Perhaps us researchers will be spared in the robot uprising, which is sure to come: As Bender says “Robots do everything faster, including evolving”.
I previously talked about how changes in the demography of learners can affect the cultural evolution of a language. The hypothesis is that language adapts to the balance between declarative and procedural memory users. Since alcohol consumption affects procedural but not declarative memory (Smith & Smith, 2003), we might expect to see communities that have a high alcohol consumption using less complex morphology.
I find that communities that have a morphologically marked future tense have significantly higher alcohol consumption than communities that have a lexically marked future tense (Alcohol consumption data from WHO, language structure data from World atlas of language structures, 198 languages, t = 14.8, p<0.0001). This statistic does not take into account many factors, but is meant as a motivation for further research into language structure and social structure.
Smith C, & Smith D (2003). Ingestion of ethanol just prior to sleep onset impairs memory for procedural but not declarative tasks. Sleep, 26 (2), 185-91 PMID: 12683478
Last night I head a talk by Geoffrey Pullum about the linguistics mega-blog language log. Amusing as always, Pullum introduced us to the writers and took us through some of his favourite posts. We even got to see a post being published live! I shouldn’t have to tell this audience about language log, but I did learn a few new things – did you know that Mark Liberman sometimes gets up at 4am to write posts? Did you know Pullum has written his own computer program for keeping track of what he’s said?
Recently, I was talking to a mathematician about blogging and he revealed that most research in mathematics is presented, reviewed, criticised, corrected and incorporated before the journal article reaches print. Publishing is more about prestige while the actual research has bypassed the review process. David Dobbs writes this week about the inflated importance of paper publishing and argues that mediums like blogging are faster, cheaper and engage the public – which should be a priority for science.
I asked Pullum whether he thought blogs would take a similar role in Linguistics. I was expecting a reply about the self-evident nature of mathematics and how Linguistics is a subject where you really need a peer-review and editorial process. However, Pullum was very positive about the role of blogs in research, and pointed out that many theories undergo rigorous criticism on language log, sometimes within minutes of being posted. Further, he feels that the blog has had an effect on science journalism and that people are much more cautious about putting forward the kinds of views that Language Log takes apart (Snowclones, prescriptive grammar etc.). Pullum also feels that blogging requires more bravery than peer-reviewed publishing: Your idea is open to the wide world without careful consideration by many people.
Certainly, I’ve benefited from blogging about my research. On the one hand, it forces me to put my research in a clear, concise format. On the other hand, other people do some of the work for me by asking questions, pointing out problems and even, in one case, checking the validity of my data. There’s even talk of blogging being part of assessed coursework for the MSc course here. Maybe one day, there will be no more need for the mysterious art of printing research on paper.
Children are better than adults at learning second languages. Children find it easy, can do it implicitly and achieve a native-like competence. However, as we get older we find learning a new language difficult, we need explicit teaching and find some aspects difficult to master such as grammar and pronunciation. What is the reason for this? The foremost theories suggest it is linked to memory constraints (Paradis, 2004; Ullman, 2005). Children find it easy to incorporate knowledge into procedural memory – memory that encodes procedures and motor skills and has been linked to grammar, morphology and pronunciation. Procedural memory atrophies in adults, but they develop good declarative memory – memory that stores facts and is used for retrieving lexical items. This seems to explain the difference between adults and children in second language learning. However, this is a proximate explanation. What about the ultimate explanation about why languages are like this?
First, he drew a distinction between the co-ordination of action between a group of people and the co-ordination of long-term goals. For co-ordination of action (e.g. carrying a heavy load/ sharing food), the discourse must reflect reality. However, for co-ordination of goals, this need not be the case. He gave an example of a hunt. Talking about where to go and plans for herding or trapping should try to reflect the real problem as closely as possible. However, if the hunt becomes long and arduous, some members might give up. Invoking a wrathful god that might motivate people to continue.
In this sense, long-term co-ordination needs to sole the free-rider problem (where a lazy minority who still reap the benefits of the group will eventually destabilise the group and the benefits disappear). You can do this by invoking beliefs in higher powers that punish defectors or reward co-operators. However, evidence against these beliefs might destabilise the group.
The evidence against a belief can come in three forms: Evidence can directly contradict the content of a belief. A belief that there is a Unicorn that follows me around will soon be destabilised. The answer is to make the beliefs invisible, dangerous of far away (the Flying Spaggetti Monster comes to mind).
A belief can also exploit the current methodological context. For example, it’s easy to claim the shroud of Turin really does date back to the time of Christ if Carbon Dating hasn’t been invented yet.
Finally, a belief can use social context to protect it from destabilisation – for example, you can make the shroud of Turin ‘sacred’ so that it can’t be examined or questioned.
A belief that harnesses all three of these tactics is, in Talmont-Kaminski’s terms, ‘Superempirical’. That is, you can’t disprove it because it resists empirical investigation. This means that religion can be shaped by functionality rather than evidence. This is exactly what you want to achieve social co-ordination of long-term goals.
Talmont-Kaminski also points out that the consequences of defecting should also be Superempirical. For example, going to Heaven or Hell in an afterlife.
In the conference, a commentator pointed out that many nations that have very good co-ordination of social goals (e.g. Sweden) seem to be aethist, while many nations that are very un-coordinated (e.g. Afghanistan) are rife with religious belief. Talmont-Kaminski took this point, but argued that there are now social constructs (banks, government) that can take over the role of co-ordination of goals more effectively.
Talmont-Kaminski has a book coming out soon, a preview chapter can be found here.
Konrad Talmont-Kaminski (2008). In a Mirror, Darkly: Does Superstition Reflect Rationality? Skeptical Inquirer, 32 (4)
In a recent post, James wrote about the Social Sensitivity hypothesis. Given findings that certain genetic variants will make a person more sensitive to social contact and more reliant on social contact under stress, it proposes that certain genetic variants ‘fit’ better with certain social structures. In support of this idea, Way and Lieberman (2010) find a correlation between the prevalence of this variant and the level of collectivism (as opposed to individualism) in a society.
An alternative explanation I’ve been thinking about is migration patterns. If genetic differences make a person less reliant on social networks, they may be more likely to migrate. This would predict that areas settled later in human history will have more ‘non socially sensitive’ individuals.
In a series of posts, I’ve been discussing constraints on the evolution of colour terms. Here, I discuss the role of drift and also argue that universal patterns are not necessarily good evidence for innate constraints. For the full dissertation and references, go here.
Drift
An important point which has not been highlighted in the literature is the drift introduced by cultural transmission. Perceptual systems are noisy, and change over lifetimes. Therefore, systems of categorising these perceptions may drift over time. However, if concepts are shared, this drift is influenced by more than one system. This may cause a different kind of drift from a stand-alone system for self-thought. Communication has an additional semantic bottleneck which self-though does not have. Using language for self thought, if you don’t know a label, you can make one up.
However, for communication, this won’t work. For example, in models of cultural transmission (e.g., Steels & Belpaeme, 2005) agents do create new labels but, importantly, accept the speaker’s label when available. That is, communicative systems are more flexible than systems for self-thought (communicators must be more willing to change their minds), and so are more subject to drift. The drift allows the system to move around the possible space of coding efficiency and object categorisation efficiency. Peaks in these landscapes will attract the drift, hence environmental and perceptual constraints being projected into language.
Although systems of colour categorisation for self-thought may be more efficient if they were constrained by the environment, shared cultural systems are more likely to reflect constraints in the environment because they are more flexible. That is, perceptual constraints have projected themselves into language because of a communicative pressure, rather than a perceptual or environmental pressure.
I suggest that this drift, together with an ability for categories to warp perceptual spaces, would mean that individuals converge on a shared perceptual system. If comprehension involves the activation of perceptual representations, then communication involves individuals reaching similar perceptual representations or, in a perfect world, activation of the same neural substrates. Therefore, a population with a shared perceptual system would be able to communicate much more effectively. In this sense, Embodied systems improve communicative success, whereas the same effect is not necessarily true of Symbolist systems. Furthermore, this drift means that populations can still converge on similar solutions, without having to assume that Universal biases are the main driving force. It has been argued that the similarities in colour categorisation between cultures contradicts Relativism, which would predict a large variation in colour categorisation between cultures (e.g., Belpaeme & Bleys, 2005). I argue that this inference is not necessarily valid.
Summary
This series of posts has shown that a wide range of factors constrain the categorisation of colour, including the physiology of perception, the environment and cultural transmission. Why is there evidence for Colour Terms being adapted to so many domains?
This study considered the idea that categorisation acquired by individuals can feed back into perception and itself become a constraint both on the development of categorisation, the environment and genetic inheritance. In this sense, the feedback from categorisation allows Niche Construction dynamics to apply to linguistic categorisations. It was argued that this dynamic fits with the Cultural implication of an Embodied account of language comprehension. That is, this study has concluded, similarly to Kirby et al. (2007), that universal patterns across populations do not necessarily imply strong innate biases. This was done by arguing that Cultural, Embodied systems tend to drift towards better representations of the real world, which involves better coherence with perceptual and environmental constraints, creating cross-cultural patterns. Furthermore, an Embodied approach to cultural dynamics incorporating a mechanism for perceptual warping predicts that the perceptual spaces of individuals can be synchronised through language to achieve better communication.
Steels, L., & Belpaeme, T. (2005). Coordinating perceptually grounded categories through language: A case study for colour Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28 (04) DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X05000087
Belpaeme, T. (2005). Explaining Universal Color Categories Through a Constrained Acquisition Process Adaptive Behavior, 13 (4), 293-310 DOI: 10.1177/105971230501300404
Kirby, S., Dowman, M., & Griffiths, T. (2007). Innateness and culture in the evolution of language Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (12), 5241-5245 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0608222104
This section reiterates how a link between linguistic categories and perception fits into Niche Construction Theory. If concepts can influence perception, and people share the same concepts, their perceptions will become synchronised. This would render them more effective at communication, since referents would be perceived as similar (‘red’ can refer to the same domain of entities for each individual). Furthermore, it may render them more able to co-operatively build a better model of the actual environment (for instance, describing an unseen danger, or researching physics). However, this will only be true if language is grounded in constraints that come from the actual environment. If this were not the case, apart from being inefficient at describing the actual environment, a language may drift to influence the perceived environment in a way that results in a worse fit with the actual environment.
Returning to the constraints diagram (above), note that the influence of categorisation continues, through action, to change the environment. In other words, if language influences the perceived environment and facilitates communication, then it may also facilitate the way we change the actual environment. In this sense, language’s influence on perception can be regarded as a form of Niche Construction (Laland, Odling-Smee & Feldman, 2000). Therefore, not only does language become better at describing the actual environment, but the environment becomes better suited to being described by language. This creates a better fit between perceived and actual environments and possibly increases the fitness of language users. Essentially, then, this study presents evidence for language-specific niche construction where language can influence the environment. This dynamic would be a consequence of an Embodied system, and more efficient as part of an Embodied system than a Symbolist account. I therefore argue that the Embodied account is supported.
As an example of this dynamic, Hansen et al. (2006) showed that perception is affected by semantic knowledge, specifically that achromatic bananas look yellow. However, bananas are domesticated (Heslop-Harrison & Schwarzacher, 2007). The link between a banana’s structure and colour, therefore, is a constructed niche – cultivators fertilise the ‘best’ bananas, which go on to influence the way they perceive bananas, which affects which bananas they fertilise, and so on. This means that the effect found in Hansen et al. cannot be innate, since the colour and structure of a banana have changed (see below). Modulating perception with flexible, high-level categories is a way of keeping up with rapidly changing environments.
Differing structures and colours of six species of banana, all ripe. Top left: Musa balbisiana, ancestor of modern cultivated bananas. Top right: Pink Banana (Musa velutina). Bottom, from left to right: Plantains (Musa paradisiacal), red bananas (Musa rutilus), Bananito (Musa acuminate) and Cavendish bananas (Musa cavendishii). Images from Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org
Less anecdotally, Griffin’s (2006) model, which classified objects using colour (see section 5.2.2), found that natural colour categories optimally aid the identification of objects. Furthermore, the model performed equally well for natural and manufactured objects. That is, manufactured objects have been coloured to be maximally classifiable by colour, according to linguistic colour categorisations. This would be an intuitive and efficient tactic if, as Embodied Cognition suggests, comprehension is scaffolded onto systems of object recognition (MacWhinney, 1999). There would be no advantage in doing this in a Symbolist system where perceptions and concepts have arbitrary connections.
Laland, K., Odling-Smee, J., & Feldman, M. (2000). Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23 (1), 131-146 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X00002417
Hansen, T., Olkkonen, M., Walter, S., & Gegenfurtner, K. (2006). Memory modulates color appearance Nature Neuroscience, 9 (11), 1367-1368 DOI: 10.1038/nn1794
Heslop-Harrison, J., & Schwarzacher, T. (2007). Domestication, Genomics and the Future for Banana Annals of Botany, 100 (5), 1073-1084 DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcm191
Griffin, L. (2004). Optimality of the Basic Colours Categories Journal of Vision, 4 (8), 309-309 DOI: 10.1167/4.8.309
The assumption that all perceptual spaces are the same may be unrealistic and may favour Universalism (see Levinson, 2000). To begin with, colour vision and colour concepts develop during ontogeny (Bornstein, Kessen & Weiskopf, 1976, Roberson, Davidoff, Davies & Shapiro, 2004). Secondly, there may be an underestimation of the variation in colour term systems across cultures (see section 5.2.5). Going back to the example of Tzotzil, colour terms seem to be intricately related in a way that, for example, ‘blue’ and ‘green’ in English seem not to be. This prompts a third way of approaching the formation of colour categories. An individual begins with no conceptual space, but learns relationships between colour terms and perceptions. For example, learning that ‘yellow’ and ‘blue’ are as different as light with 640nm and 450nm wavelengths. By using an embodied, relational approach to colour categories, one can construct relationships between terms based on any perceivable feature. This could include brilliance, reflectance or the physical structure of the object. Therefore, a banana looks yellow because its colour is understood in terms of its structure, as well as its spectral properties. This is a more stable approach to object identification, since structures are usually stable, while colour is not. It would also fit with the grammaticalisation of colour terms to extend to other domains. For example, the Tzotzil sak-vilan, meaning ‘pastel’ originates from the fading of colours on fabric from fraying (MacKeigan & Muth, 2006). Constructing relationships between words based on the relationships between the perceptual properties of their referents would then be part of a general learning mechanism which facilitated the learning of all concepts.
Levinson, S. (2000). Yeli Dnye and the Theory of Basic Color Terms Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 10 (1), 3-55 DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2000.10.1.3
Bornstein, M., Kessen, W., & Weiskopf, S. (1976). Color vision and hue categorization in young human infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2 (1), 115-129 DOI: 10.1037/0096-1523.2.1.115
Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Davies, I., & Shapiro, L. (2004). The Development of Color Categories in Two Languages: A Longitudinal Study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133 (4), 554-571 DOI: 10.1037/0096-3445.133.4.554
