The origins of word order

October 18, 2011 in Uncategorized

A paper by Gell-Mann & Ruhlen in PNAS this week conducts a phylogenetic analysis of word order in languages and concludes that SOV is the most likely ancestor language word order.  The main conclusions from the analysis are:

(i) The word order in the ancestral language was SOV.

(ii) Except for cases of diffusion, the direction of syntactic change, when it occurs, has been for the most part SOV > SVO and, beyond that, SVO > VSO/VOS with a subsequent reversion to SVO occurring occasionally. Reversion to SOV occurs only through diffusion.

(iii) Diffusion, although important, is not the dominant process in the evolution of word order.

(iv) The two extremely rare word orders (OVS and OSV) derive directly from SOV.

This analysis agrees with Luke Maurtis‘ work on function and Uniform Information Density (blogged about here).

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment »

Talk to the Virtual Hands

October 16, 2011 in Abstracts, Science

A new paper in PlosOne has used new fancy research methods to look at whether humans are more capable of describing a word using just spoken communication, or whether the use of gesture also helps. This research is pertinent to the field of language evolution because it might help us understand if spoken language co-evolved with gesture as well as helping us understand how language is processed in the brain.

This new study builds on previous research in this area by using avatars in a virtual reality setting. Participants were either in control of the movements of their avatar, or not.

The study found that participants were much more successful in communicating concepts when the speaker was able to use their own gestures when explaining a concept using spoken language. The body language of the listener also impacted success at the task, showing the need for nonverbal feedback from the listener.

It’s worth noting that the primary purpose of this research wasn’t to find if gesture is helpful in communication (though that is certainly interesting and worthwhile) but rather whether using virtual reality is fruitful in these kinds of experiments.

The press release discusses some of the problems with using avatars:

The researchers note that there are limitations to nonverbal communication in virtual reality environments. First, they found that participants move much less in a virtual environment than they do in the “real world.” They also found that the perspective of the camera in the virtual environment affected the results.

Lead author, Dr. Trevor Dodds maintains, “this research demonstrates that virtual reality technology can help us gain a greater understanding of the role of body gestures in communication. We show that body gestures carry extra information when communicating the meaning of words. Additionally, with virtual reality technology we have learned that body gestures from both the speaker and listener contribute to the successful communication of the meaning of words.  These findings are also important for the development of virtual environments, with applications including medical training, urban planning, entertainment and telecommunication.”

The work was led by Dr. Trevor Dodds at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany.

References
 Dodds TJ, Mohler BJ, Bu¨ lthoff HH (2011) Talk to the Virtual Hands: Self-Animated Avatars Improve Communication in Head-Mounted Display Virtual Environments. PLoS ONE 6(10): e25759. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025759

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
No Comments »

Cultural artefact from 25,000 years ago is transmitted horizontally

October 16, 2011 in Uncategorized

Jonnie Hughes writes this week about his time spent with the Sepik tribes of Papua New Guinea (tipped off by Michael Pleyer). As part of a documentary series, Hughes visited them and then arranged for some of the tribe elders to visit Britain. Of all the different technologies they encountered in Britain, the one that had the biggest impact was the idea of putting feathers on arrows to make them fly straight. The Sepik tribes used to achieve straight flight by using very heavy arrows, but a five minute tutorial at an archery range in a local community centre gave them the technology to use lighter arrows.  This meant that a hunter could carry more arrows and catch more prey.

Fletching technology is thought to date from as early as 25,000 years ago  (Ötzi the Iceman had some 5,000 years ago), so seems like an unlikely candidate for a horizontally transmitted cultural artefact.  Yet, with the world becoming more globalised, isolated communities are now exposed to not only modern technology, but the whole history of development that they can adopt.  Indeed, as Hughes relates, the Sepik tribes are now on Facebook and have access to Wikipedia articles on archery.

This is, of course, a nightmare for people trying to study the transmission of cultural artefacts.  What is the descent of fletching in the Sepik tribes?  Is it horizontal transmission from modern-day British archers?  Or, since the transmitter in question was re-creating traditional techniques, was it horizontal transmission from 15th century Britain (when archery was last widespread), or is it horizontal transmission from the original developers of fletching thousands of years ago?  If they continue to borrow technology from wikipedia articles, which are written by dozens of people from all over the world, what is the transmission trajectroy of these ideas?

Along with stories like the hunger-suppressing properties of Hoodia plant being transmitted from hunter-gatherers from the Kalahari to industrialised western cultures, the descent of technologies does not seem to respect cultural or historical boundaries.

Given the theme of this story, it’s strange that Hughes’ new book gives the impression of re-inventing the wheel.  The brilliantly titled “On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (and Ourselves)” has the following introduction:

Throughout history, we humans have prided ourselves on our capacity to have ideas, but perhaps this pride is misplaced. Perhaps ideas have us. After all, ideas do appear to have a life of their own. And it is they, not us, that benefit most when they are spread. Many biologists have already come to the opinion that our genes are selfish entities, tricking us into helping them to reproduce. Is it the same with our ideas?

Jonnie Hughes, a science writer and documentary filmmaker, investigates the evolution of ideas in order to find out. Adopting the role of a cultural Charles Darwin, Hughes heads off, with his brother in tow, across the Midwest to observe firsthand the natural history of ideas—the patterns of their variation, inheritance, and selection in the cultural landscape. In place of Darwin’s oceanic islands, Hughes visits the “mind islands” of Native American tribes. Instead of finches, Hughes searches for signs of natural selection among the tepees.

An evolutionary approach to cultural transmission?  What a great idea.

I may be too harsh here, it actually looks like quite a fun and interesting book.  Perhaps there are already orders paced on Amazon by members of the Sepik tribes.

 

Hughes’ article: The tribesman who facebook friended me

Tags: ,
1 Comment »

Robustness, Evolvability, Degeneracy and stuff like that…

October 13, 2011 in Linguistics, Science

Much of the work I plan to do for this year involves integrating traditional and contemporary theories of language change within an evolutionary framework. In my previous post I introduced the concept of degeneracy, which, to briefly recap, refers to components that have a structure-to-function ratio of many-to-one, with a single degenerate structure being capable of performing distinct functions under different conditions (pluripotent). Whitcare (2010: 5) provides a case in point for biological systems: here, the adhesin gene family in A. Saccharomyces “ expresses proteins that typically play unique roles during development, yet can perform each other’s functions when expression levels are altered”.

But what about degeneracy in language? For a start, we already know from basic linguistic theory forms (i.e. structures) are paired with meanings (i.e. functions). More recent work has expanded upon this notion, especially in developing the concept of constructions (Goldberg, 2003): “direct form-meaning pairings that range from the very specific (words or idioms) to the more general (passive constructions, ditranstive construction), and from very small units (words with affixes, walked) to clause-level or even discourse-level units” (Beckner et al., 2009: 5). When applied to constructions, degeneracy fits squarely with work identifying language as a Complex Adaptive System (see here) and as a culturally transmitted replicator (see here and here), which offers a link between the generation of first order synchronic variation – in the form of innovation (e.g. newly introduced linguistic material in the form of sounds, words, grammatical constructions etc) – and the selection, propagation and fixation of linguistic variants within a speaker community.

For the following example, I’m going to look at a specific type of discourse-pragmatic feature, or construction, which has undergone renewed interest over the last thirty-years. Known as General Extenders (GEs) – utterance- or clause-final discourse particles, such as and stuff and or something – researchers are realising that, far from being superfluous linguistic baggage, these features “carry social meaning, perform indispensible functions in social interaction, and constitute essential elements of sentence grammar” (Pichler, 2010: 582). Of specific relevance, GEs, and discourse-pragmatic particles more generally, are multifunctional: that is, they are not confined to a single communicative domain, and can even come to serve multiple roles within the same communicative context or utterance.

It is proposed the concept of degeneracy will allow us to explain how multifunctional discourse markers emerge from variation existent at structural components of linguistic organisation, such as the phonological and morphosyntactic components. If anything, I hope the post might serve as some food for thought, as I’m still grappling with the applications of the theory (and whether there’s anything useful to say!).

Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
1 Comment »

New Blog: A Rare Bite of Linguistics

October 10, 2011 in Linguistics, Links, Science

Being someone who likes to welcome new academics blogs on the scene, particularly ones of a linguistic tilt, I urge you to go over, visit, read and maybe even leave a comment at A Rare Bite of Linguistics. It’s only one-post old, but the subject topic of language change and grammaticalisation fits in nicely with this blog’s overarching themes. As some of you might know, I wrote a bit about grammaticalisation at the start of this year, so the work is especially useful to lay folk such as myself. The post is the first of two that report the author’s findings of her MA project, which focused on the grammatical status of certainly in collocation with modal verbs. In the author’s own words:

My hypothesis is that the adverb is not fully grammaticalised even though it might show signatures of grammaticalisation.

Following Noël (2007), Bybee (2003) and Hopper and Traugott (2003) grammaticalisation affects a construction primarily and a single word secondarily; I suggest that, for modal synergy, a structural unit is formed of a modal verb and an adjacent modal adverb in mid-position, e.g. would certainly, must certainly etc. Mid-position is the ‘natural habitat’ of the modal particle and if there is grammaticalisation of certainly into a modal particle, this is consequently where we would expect to find it. Moreover, if this were a grammatical unit/construction consisting of two grammatical constituents, the grammaticality would lie in the bondedness (syntagmatic restriction) of the two elements, and the semantic and paradigmatic restrictions which are said to be part of grammaticalisation (cf. Lehmann’s parameters): we would expect an abstract meaning and perhaps reduced phonological properties (which I cannot test), paradigmaticity, low paradigmatic variability and high cohesion with modal verbs in general. Scope is a contested parameter and it seems that in this case too, we will deal with increased scope. Lastly, as Bybee (2003) indicated, frequency plays a staple role in the propagation of an item to becoming grammaticalised (see also Croft 2000).

It’s at quite a high level, but she does provide good, comprehensive definitions of what she’s studying and, more importantly, a fleshed out understanding of grammaticalisation theory and the processes underpinning it.

Tags: , , , ,
No Comments »

Cultural differences in lateral transmission: Phylogenetic trees are OK for Linguistics but not biology

October 5, 2011 in Uncategorized

The three areas under analysis

An article in PLos ONE debunks the myth that hunter-gatherer societies borrow more words than agriculturalist societies. In doing so, it suggests that horizontal transmission is low enough for phylogenetic analyses to be a valid linguistic tool.

Lexicons from around 20% of the extant languages spoken by hunter-gatherer societies were coded for etymology (available in the supplementary material). The levels of borrowed words were compared with the languages of agriculturalist and urban societies taken from the World Loanword Database.  The study focussed on three locations:  Northern Australia, northwest Amazonia, and California and the Great Basin.

In opposition to some previous hypotheses, hunter-gatherer societies did not borrow significantly more words than agricultural societies in any of the regions studied.

The rates of borrowing were universally low, with most languages not borrowing more than 10% of their basic vocabulary.  The mean rate for hunter-gatherer societies was 6.38% while the mean for 5.15%.  This difference is actually significant overall, but not within particular regions.  Therefore, the authors claim, “individual area variation is more important than any general tendencies of HG or AG languages”.

Interestingly, in some regions, mobility, population size and population density were significant factors.  Mobile populations and low-density populations had significantly lower borrowing rates, while smaller populations borrowed proportionately more words.  This may be in line with the theory of linguistic carrying capacity as discussed by Wintz (see here and here).  The level of exogamy was a significant factor in Australia.

The study concludes that phylogenetic analyses are a valid form of linguistic analysis because the level of horizontal transmission is low.  That is, languages are tree-like enough for phylogenetic assumptions to be valid:

“While it is important to identify the occasional aberrant cases of high borrowing, our results support the idea that lexical evolution is largely tree-like, and justify the continued application of quantitative phylogenetic methods to examine linguistic evolution at the level of the lexicon. As is the case with biological evolution, it will be important to test the fit of trees produced by these methods to the data used to reconstruct them. However, one advantage linguists have over biologists is that they can use the methods we have described to identify borrowed lexical items and remove them from the dataset. For this reason, it has been proposed that, in cases of short to medium time depth (e.g., hundreds to several thousand years), linguistic data are superior to genetic data for reconstructing human prehistory “

Excellent – linguistics beats biology for a change!

However, while the level of horizontal transmission might not be a problem in this analysis, there may be a problem in the paths of borrowing.  If a language borrows relatively few words, but those words come from many different languages, and may have many paths through previous generations, there may be a subtle effect of horizontal transition that is being masked.  The authors acknowledge that they did not address the direction of transmission in a quantitative way.

A while ago, I did study of English etymology trying to quantify the level of horizontal transmission through time (description here).  The graph for English doesn’t look tree-like to me, perhaps the dynamics of borrowing works differently for languages with a high level of contact:

Claire Bowern, Patience Epps, Russell Gray, Jane Hill, Keith Hunley, Patrick McConvell, Jason Zentz (2011). Does Lateral Transmission Obscure Inheritance in Hunter-Gatherer Languages? PLoS ONE, 6 (9) : doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025195

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
6 Comments »

Scientifically Pedantic Movie Reviews…

October 4, 2011 in Irreverant and Irrelevant, Science

Hello!

I’ve written a review of the new Planet of the Apes film (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, ARGH! OH GOD THE PLANET IS RISING etc.). It concentrates on the linguistic abilities of apes a bit, but I hope I haven’t made it too dull for the purposes of a movie review. There should be more scientifically/linguistically pedantic reviewing going on out there… get on it guys. It’s up on lablit.com now. Here’s a excerpt and link:

As someone who has dedicated quite a lot of time to reading about the linguistic abilities of apes, I didn’t enter the cinema to see “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” hoping for viable or realistic linguistic science. After all, we’ve all seen the original films and the apes talk just as humans do. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that this would never happen in the real world, and this is not just because of the cognitive abilities of apes, but also because of the vocal tract of apes. That is to say that no matter how intelligent an ape is, it will not be possible for that ape to create the sounds of English as the physical ability simply isn’t there…

Read more at: lablit.com

Tags: , , , , , ,
No Comments »

Free Online Machine Learning Course

October 2, 2011 in 101, Modelling

Hello!

This is a quick post about a free online course on Machine Learning. The course is run by Andrew Ng at Stanford and I thought it would be of interest to those who read this blog as it covers learning algorithms which help us to understand how humans learn things as well as machines.

The course comes in structured chunks which are released a week at a time. It hasn’t started yet as it is in the pre-launch period but you can go on the site, sign up and watch the first week of videos and answer the review questions to get a head start.

It seems that this course is running as a beta version of what online courses could be in the future. If you’re even slightly interested in how machines, and indeed humans, learn I suggest you sign up and take part. You can set the difficulty as basic or advanced and it’s FREE!

Sign up and see the first week of videos here: http://www.ml-class.org/course/class/index

You can also see a lecture series by Andrew Ng on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?index=1&v=UzxYlbK2c7E&list=PLA89DCFA6ADACE599

Tags: , ,
No Comments »

Neural Language Networks at Birth

September 30, 2011 in Abstracts, Linguistics, Science

I haven’t had chance to read this paper, but it throws up some interesting discussion points relating to this blog. In particular, it relates to a hypothesis I put forward last year on Domain-General Regions and Domain-Specific Networks. Here is the abstract:

The ability to learn language is a human trait. In adults and children, brain imaging studies have shown that auditory language activates a bilateral frontotemporal network with a left hemispheric dominance. It is an open question whether these activations represent the complete neural basis for language present at birth. Here we demonstrate that in 2-d-old infants, the language-related neural substrate is fully active in both hemispheres with a preponderance in the right auditory cortex. Functional and structural connectivities within this neural network, however, are immature, with strong connectivities only between the two hemispheres, contrasting with the adult pattern of prevalent intrahemispheric connectivities. Thus, although the brain responds to spoken language already at birth, thereby providing a strong biological basis to acquire language, progressive maturation of intrahemispheric functional connectivity is yet to be established with language exposure as the brain develops.

Paper Link: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/38/16056.short?rss=1

 

Tags: , , , ,
No Comments »

Does a Smart Phone make Smart Science?

September 29, 2011 in Science, Science News

A new paper in plos one, published today, has shown that experiments on human cognition needn’t be confined to the lab.

Experiments on human cognitive abilities, such as language, often rely on testing small and homogeneous groups of volunteers (mostly undergraduate students) coming to research facilities where they are asked to participate in behavioral experiments. This arrangement is not ideal as your sample will not be representative of the population as a whole and will also be restricted as there is only so many participants that money and time will allow you to get into the lab to be tested.

This new research by Dufau et al. shows that the sampling limitations which laboratory experiments produce can be overcome by using smartphones. Using smart phone technology, data can be collected for cognitive science experiments from thousands of subjects from all over the world.

To illustrate how this can be done the authors carried out a large-scale study using  iPhone and iPads. This was a linguistic study looking at people’s ability to distinguish words from similar non-words.

The project, which began in December 2010 has managed to collect data from 4,157 subjects in just 4 months! This can be compared with the English Lexicon Project which acquired a similar volume of data using traditional methods which took more than 3 years.

The data was collected using applications which were produced in seven languages (English, Basque, Catalan, Dutch, French, Malay, Spanish). Smartphones can also support studies in alphabets other than Roman including Chinese, Greek, and Japanese. This creates the opportunity to create large-scale cross linguistic studies without even having to move from behind your desk.

Whilst the example here is linguistic there is every reason that smart phones can be implemented in looking at how universal other areas of cognitive behaviour are. Or even neurosceince and experimental philosophy.  I wonder if it would be possible to carry out experiments using transmission chains using smart phones.

However, I do worry that using things like iPhones will have the same problems as using things like mechanical turk, as it means that experimenters will not be able to make sure that participants are carrying out the tasks properly and removes quite a lot of control. Smartphones are also still a luxury and therefore only people within a certain socio-economic class will have smartphones, so maybe these methods may not reach such a wide audience, which seems to be why they’re being proposed in the first place.

The authors of the paper are hailing smartphones  ”a potential revolution in cognitive science” but only time will tell if this really kicks off!

Reference

Stephane Dufau, Jon Andoni Dun abeitia, Carmen Moret-Tatay, Aileen McGonigal, David Peeters, F.-Xavier Alario, David A. Balota, Marc Brysbaert, Manuel Carreiras, Ludovic Ferrand, Maria Ktori, Manuel Perea, Kathy Rastle, Olivier Sasburg, Melvin J. Yap, J (2011). Smart Phone, Smart Science: How the Use of Smartphones Can Revolutionize Research in Cognitive Science PlosOne, 6 (9) : 10.1371/journal.pone.0024974

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
No Comments »

← Previous Entries
Next Entries →