Search Results for: spurious

A Cautionary Tale: Linguists are a powerful force of change (for phoneme inventories at least)

I’ve been reading through an earlier draft of my dissertation and noticed a few paragraphs that were omitted due to word length. Despite not making the final cut, it serves as nice reminder about where our data is coming from: that is, when we dive into WALS or UPSID, take a particular inventory and look … Continue reading “A Cautionary Tale: Linguists are a powerful force of change (for phoneme inventories at least)”

Social structure and language evolution: resolving the synthetic/analytic debate

A cultural evolution approach to language suggests that genes encode weak prior biases that can be amplified through cultural transmission to produce strong language universals.  Below is a diagram from Kirby, Dowman & Griffiths (2007). Note the long-term feedback between language universals and genes.  However, recent research is pointing towards a more complicated picture. 

Tea Leaves and Lingua Francas: Why the future is not easy to predict

We all take comfort in our ability to project into the future. Be it through arbitrary patterns in Spring Pouchong tea leaves, or making statistical inferences about the likelihood that it will rain tomorrow, our accumulation of knowledge about the future is based on continued attempts of attaining certainty: that is, we wish to know … Continue reading “Tea Leaves and Lingua Francas: Why the future is not easy to predict”

Linguistic diversity and traffic accidents

I was thinking about Daniel Nettle’s model of linguistic diversity which showed that linguistic variation tends to decline even with a small amount of migration between communities.  I wondered if statistics about population movement would correlate with linguistic diversity, as measured by the Greenberg Diversity Index (GDI) for a country (see below).  However, this is … Continue reading “Linguistic diversity and traffic accidents”

Genetic Anchoring, Tone and Stable Characteristics of Language

In 2007, Dan Dediu and Bob Ladd published a paper claiming there was a non-spurious link between the non-derived alleles of ASPM and Microcephalin and tonal languages. The key idea emerging from this research is one where certain alleles may bias language acquisition or processing, subsequently shaping the development of a language within a population … Continue reading “Genetic Anchoring, Tone and Stable Characteristics of Language”