Emergence of linguistic diversity in the lab

There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where linguistic diversity emerges and persists within groups of interacting individuals.  Previous research has identified the use of linguistic cues of identity as an important factor in the development of linguistic diversity (e.g. Nettle, 1999).  Gareth Roberts looks at this issue with an experimental paradigm.

This experiment was a game where individuals had to trade commodities in a series of rounds. At each round, individuals were paired up either with a team-mate or a competitor, though the speaker’s true identity was hidden.  Players were given random resources, but scored points based on how ‘balanced’ their resources were after trading (that is, you were punished for having much more meat than corn, for example).  A commodity given to another individual was worth twice as much to the receiver as to the donor.

Players could only interact through an ‘alien’ language via an instant-messaging system.  Prior to the game, individuals learned an artificial language which they were to use in these interactions. All participants were initially given the same starting language.  There were several conditions that manipulated the frequency with which you interacted with your team-mate and whether the task was competitive or co-operative.  In the co-operative condition, four players were considered as part of the same team and the task was to get a high a score as possible.  In the competitive condition the four players were split into two groups and the task was to score more than the other team.  In this condition, then, the main task was to identify whether your partner was a co-operator or a competitor.

The results showed that, if players interacted frequently enough with their team-mates and were in competition with another group, then linguistic diversity emerged.  Over the course of the game each team developed its own ‘variety’, and this was used as a marker of group identity. For example, in one game two forms of the word for ‘you’ arose.  Players in one team tended to use ‘lale’ while players in the other team tended to use ‘lele’, meaning that players could tell group membership from this variation.  Thus, linguistic variation arose due to the linguistic system evolving to encode the identity of the speakers.

The diversity seemed to arise both from drift and intentional change, both of which have been documented in the sociolinguistic literature.  Roberts suggests that linguistic markers make good social markers because they are costly to obtain (so difficult for free-riders to fake), salient and flexible enough to cope with changing group dynamics.  In the next post, I’ll be thinking about a similar experiment looking at how linguistic variation might arise in a co-operative scenario.

Roberts, G. (2010). An experimental study of social selection and frequency of interaction in linguistic diversity Interaction Studies, 11 (1), 138-159 DOI: 10.1075/is.11.1.06rob

The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its perfection, past and future

Just came across these videos of Noam Chomsky via the Linguistics Blog:

The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its Perfection, Past and Future by Noam Chomsky (1/4) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

 

The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its Perfection, Past and Future by Noam Chomsky (2/4) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

 

The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its Perfection, Past and Future by Noam Chomsky (3/4) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

 

The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its Perfection, Past and Future by Noam Chomsky (4/4) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

I haven’t had chance to watch these yet, and I’m not sure when I’ll next get a chance, but I’ll try and come back to this over the next few days.

Imitation and Social Cognition (III): Man’s best friend

In my two previous posts (here and here) about imitation and social cognition I wrote about experiments which showed that
1)  young children tend to imitate both the necessary as well as the unnecessary actions when shown how to get at a reward, whereas wild chimpanzees only imitate the necessary actions.
And that
2) both 14-month old human infants as well as enculturated, human raised-chimpanzees tend to ‘imitate rationally.’ That is, they tend to be able to differentiate whether an agent chose a specific way of performing an action intentionally, or whether the agent was forced to performing the action in this specific manner by some constraint.
ResearchBlogging.orgIt can be argued that these experiments demonstrate that human infants and young children show an early sensitivity to the communicative intentions of others. That is, they seem to be able to infer that a demonstrator’s specific (and ‘odd’ ) actions are somehow relevant, because she chose this specific manner freely (see also these two extremely interesting posts by the philosopher Pierre Jacob, on which my own post is partly based)

The fact that human-raised chimpanzees also show this sensitivity suggests that enculturation plays an important part in this process.
In a very interesting study, Range et al. (2007) used an experimental setup similar to that of Gergely et al. (2002) (which i described in my second post, here) to test whether other ‘enculturated’ and domesticated animals show the same kind of sensitivity: dogs.

Wampanoag film

 

A new documentary has been made about the resurrection of the Wampanoag language which has a few screenings coming up next month in the US. DVD’s are also available and details of both can be found here.

The story begins in 1994 when Jessie Little Doe, an intrepid, thirty-something Wampanoag social worker, began having recurring dreams: familiar-looking people from another time addressing her in an incomprehensible language. Jessie was perplexed and a little annoyed– why couldn’t they speak English? Later, she realized they were speaking Wampanoag, a language no one had used for more than a century. These events

sent her and members of the Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanaog communities on an odyssey that would uncover hundreds of documents written in their language, lead Jessie to a Masters in Linguistics at MIT, and result in something that had never been done before – bringing a language alive again in an American Indian community after many generations with no Native speakers.

WE STILL LIVE HERE: As Nutayunean clip

Although I haven’t seen the film it sounds to be very much in the same vein as “the linguists” which came out in 2008. The Linguists follows two field linguists as they travel to document and help promote the rescue of near-extinct languages.

Documenting and reviving languages is an important thing to do as it increases our understanding of language. Every time a language dies we lose data which can inform us on the interactions between cognitive constraints and culture. A language dies every 14 days. Bearing that in mind, here’s a few links if you’re interested in this stuff:

SAIVUS (Society to Advance Indigenous Vernaculars of the United States): http://www.saivus.org/

Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project: http://wlrp.org/

Enduring voices: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/enduring-voices/

And a whole bunch of other links here: http://www.saivus.org/saivuslinks.html

 

Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat

GoatsIn what is sure to be a more cited paper than Gould and Lewontin (1979), Douglas Ochs at Columbia University, together with a team of internationally renowned scientists (and probably a few internationally unknown graduate students), has found that all of humanity can be traced back to a large Pliocene-era goat.

More interesting, for this blog at least, is the finding that the roots of early Indo-European language were in goat bleating. Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down the actual paper myself to find the details of this argument, but if you’re interested, I would suggest looking at the original article where I found this wonderful and groundbreaking study, on the popular peer-reviewed site the Onion.

Full disclosure: This post has been listed in the Irrelevant and Irreverent category, because it probably fits there. We’re not seriously suggesting that humans do in fact go back to a single large goat species in the Pliocene – that’s much too early. Rather, it’s more likely that the goat species was around in the Silurian period. It feasted mainly on trilobites.

Phonology and Phonetics 101: Vowels pt 1

In phonetics and phonology there is an important distinction to be made between sounds that can be broadly categorised into two divisions: consonants and vowels. For this post, however, I will be focusing on the second, and considered by some to be the more problematic, division. So, what are vowels? For one, they probably aren’t just the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) you were taught in during school. This is one of the big problems when teaching the sounds systems of a language with such an entrenched writing system, as in English, especially when there is a big disconnect between the sounds you make in speech and the representation of sound in orthography. To give a simple example: how many different vowels are there in bat, bet, arm, and say? Well, if you were in school, then a typical answer would be two: a and e. In truth, from a phonological standpoint, there are four different vowels: [æ], [e], [ɑː], [eɪ]. The point that vowel-sounds are different from vowel-letters is an easy one to get across. The difficultly arises in actually providing a working definition. So, again, I ask:

What are vowels?

Continue reading “Phonology and Phonetics 101: Vowels pt 1”

Possible Stroke on Live Television

I was alerted recently of this video. It’s short, and the rest of the post won’t make sense without watching it.

My mate Ally said that “I’m sure there’s some kind of linguistic point to be made here but I have no idea what it is.” My first few times through the video, I was also confused. However, the comment section is where things become clear. At the risk of being one of those reporters who mentions twitter-posts, TopGunMD1 stated:

“Its obvious she just had a STROKE! She is currently suffering from Wernicke’s aphasia, its a very serious problem. I hope her producer realized this and took her to the hospital immediately. If you ever see someone talk like that, call an ambulance or take them to the ER immediately.”

This is most likely a correct diagnosis. What’s happened here is that she’s had a stroke which dealt a debilitating blow to her Wernicke’s area, and she’s lost her recall for words. This might be seen as normal stumbling, but for the fact that she is a reporter, which would mean that she should historically stumble only very rarely, and never this much. Around a third of stroke sufferers develop speech problems, some of which can be reversed later. It is unclear here whether she is merely experiencing aphasia or speech production errors as well.

It looks like her fellows recognised her problem very quickly, and cut back to the next scheduled thing. As well, she’s been taken to the hospital for tests – let’s hope this isn’t permanent.

The Quill to Communicate?

New footage has been filmed of a little known animal called the Streaked Tenrec in Madagascar. The footage shows the creatures can rub their quills together to make ultrasound calls and can also produce tongue clicks  to each other which are outside of the range of human hearing.  Because of the ultra sonic nature of these sounds, it has been unknown quite to the extent that these creatures can do this, before now.

The BBC, who’s film crew for the new ‘Madagascar’ series filmed the animals, states in their article about the new findings:

Using the bat detector, the filmmakers found that the seemingly “quiet” mammals were constantly communicating.

and

Few studies have been made to investigate why streaked tenrecs communicate both vocally and via their quills but they are currently the only mammals known to do so.

This may be a classic misuse of the word ‘communicate’ in that just because an animal is making a noise does not make that noise communicative. At no point in the article does it make any claim about what it might be that they are trying to communicate to each other and the only assertation that is made as to why the Tenrecs might be making ultrasonic noises is when the story goes on to state that scientists hypothesize that these ultrasonic sounds are being used as echo location and so to call these sounds communication is the same as calling our ability to see where we’re going communicative (it’s not).

Not to completely discredit the premise of the story by the BBC, the behaviour of producing the ultrasonic sounds using the quills could be a form of stridulation which is used by other animals to attract a mate, act as a warning signal or to protect territory. If this is the case it could be groundbreaking stuff as stridulation has never been seen before in mammals. But until the production of sound can be seen to manipulate the behaviour of others it seems ‘communication’ may be too strong of a word.