Search Results for “spurious” – Page 2

Future tense and saving money: Small number bias

Last week saw the release of the latest Roberts & Winters collaboration (with guest star Keith Chen). The paper, Future Tense and Economic Decisions: Controlling for Cultural Evolution, builds upon Chen’s previous work by controlling for historical relationships between cultures. As Sean pointed out in his excellent overview, the analysis was extremely complicated, taking over two … Continue reading “Future tense and saving money: Small number bias”

Future tense and saving money: no correlation when controlling for cultural evolution

This week our paper on future tense and saving money is published (Roberts, Winters & Chen, 2015). In this paper we test a previous claim by Keith Chen about whether the language people speak influences their economic decisions (see Chen’s TED talk here or paper). We find that at least part of the previous study’s … Continue reading “Future tense and saving money: no correlation when controlling for cultural evolution”

Rice, collectivism and cultural history

Today I published a short commentary on a recent paper which found correlations between rice growing and collectivism (Talhelm et al., 2014). We’ve written about collectivism before (and here). However, while this may sound like a spurious correlation, there’s more to it: The theory is that communities which engage in more intensive practices, and therefore … Continue reading “Rice, collectivism and cultural history”

Tone and humidity

Does the weather effect the languages we speak? This week, Caleb Everett, Damian Blasi and I have a paper out in PNAS (also available here) on the effects of humidity on the production and perception of lexical tone, and the subsequent predictions about the distribution of tone across the world. The basic principle behind studies … Continue reading “Tone and humidity”

Serotonin and short-term/long-term orientation

This week I discovered that an analysis using Causal Graphs that James and I did in 2013 has been backed up by more recent data. This demonstrates the power of Causal Graph analysis, which we’ll be discussing in our workshop on Causality in the Language Sciences (submission deadline extended!) A recent paper demonstrates a correlation … Continue reading “Serotonin and short-term/long-term orientation”

Adaptive languages: Population structure and lexical diversity

A new paper by Bentz et al. is available for preview here. It is about a correlation between the lexical diversity of languages and the presence of non-native speakers in a population. This is particularly relevant to the work by Lupyan & Dale (2010), who found that morphological complexity within a language correlates with the … Continue reading “Adaptive languages: Population structure and lexical diversity”

QWERTY: The Next Generation

[This is a guest post by Oh wait, I’m not a guest anymore. Thanks to James for inviting me to become a regular contributor to Replicated Typo. I hope I will have to say some interesting things about the evoution of language, cognition, and culture, and I promise that I’ll try to keep my … Continue reading “QWERTY: The Next Generation”

Photographing language science (and language evolution)

Language scientists in Nijmegen have been showing off their artistic side, capturing their research in photography. Head over to Taal in Beeld for a look at the entries – some of them are really stunning. My entry was a picture of my fieldsite (my computer), made up of 36,864 graphs which show how every linguistic … Continue reading “Photographing language science (and language evolution)”

The SpecGram Essential Guide to Linguistics

What does a Labio-nasal sound like? What is the laziest language on earth? How can a knowledge of linguistics help make macaroni cheese? What is the tiny phoneme hypothesis? Where can you find a book that synergises all the loose ends of linguistics into a unified, transparent theory? I don’t know. In the meanwhile, try … Continue reading “The SpecGram Essential Guide to Linguistics”

Altitude and Ejectives: Hypotheses up in the air

A recent paper in PLOS ONE by Caleb Everett looks at whether geography can affect phoneme inventories. Everett finds that language communities that live at higher altitudes are more likely to have ejective sounds in their phoneme inventories. One of Everett’s hypotheses is that the lower air pressure at higher altitudes makes ejectives easier to … Continue reading “Altitude and Ejectives: Hypotheses up in the air”