I’ve just finished reading The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. Yes, I’m a little behind the times for a geek. Anyway, I was struck by the concept of Azad in the book. The protagonist visits an Imperial civilisation whose whole society revolves around the playing of a board game called Azad. Except this is a vastly complicated board game, played on multiple, football-field-sized boards with semi-conscious pieces and developed over thousands of years. In fact, the game is so complicated that you can’t play it well unless your cognitive structures have been shaped by the game from a very young age. Here’s a little extract:
Tag: language
The emergence of stable bilingualism in the lab: An experiment proposal
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 interacting groups use several languages. In fact, by some estimates, bilingualism is the norm for most societies. If one views language as a tool for communicating about objects and events, it seems strange that linguistic diversity should be maintained over time for two reasons. First, it seems more efficient, during language use, to have a one-to-one mapping between signals and meanings. In fact, mutual exclusivity is exhibited by young children and has been argued to be an innate bias and crucial to the evolution of a linguistic system. How or why do bilinguals over-ride this bias? Secondly, learning two language systems must be more difficult than learning one. What is the motivation for expending extra effort on learning an apparently redundant system?
Despite these obstacles, stable bilingualism exists in many parts of the world. How might these arise and be maintained? Continue reading “The emergence of stable bilingualism in the lab: An experiment proposal”
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
Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat
In 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?
Intelligence: Darwin vs. Wallace
It’s Charles Darwin’s birthday today! He’s 202. So in celebration I’ve written a post on the still ongoing controversy which the theory of evolution by natural selection caused and is causing, specifically with regards to the emergence of human intelligence.
Alfred Russel Wallace is widely seen as the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. While Darwin had been formulating his theory from as early as the late 1830s, he kept quite about it for more than twenty years while he amassed evidence to support it. In 1858 Alfred Russell Wallace, a naturalist of the same time, sent Darwin a letter outlining for him a theory of evolution which very closely mirrored Darwin’s own. The pair co-presented their theory to the Linnaean Society in 1858 but due to Darwin’s long time amassing evidence and refining his ideas, it was his book, On The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859 and set Darwin’s name firmly in the history books as the discoverer of natural selection.
While Wallace’s part in the discovery of natural selection is far from undocumented or unknown, it is largely for presenting ‘the same ideas’ as Darwin for which he is known and what is rarely discussed in the differences in their ideas. In this post I will briefly discuss a new(ish) paper by Steven Pinker on the evolution of human intelligence and some the differences between the thinking of Darwin and Wallace on the subject.
Darwin, unsurprisingly, asserted that the abstract nature of human intelligence can be fully explained by natural selection. In opposition to this Wallace claimed that it was of no use to ancestral humans and therefore could only be explained by intelligent design:
“Natural selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a few degrees superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher.”(Wallace, 1870:343)
Unsurprisingly most scientists these days do not agree with Wallace on either the point that the human brain could not be the result of natural selection or that as a result of this problem it must have been a product of design by a higher being. It would be both dismissive and dull to leave the discussion at that however, which is where Pinker comes in. Despite Wallace’s argument probably coming to the wrong conclusion he does bring up some very interesting questions which need answering, namely that of; “why do humans have the ability to pursue abstract intellectual feats such as science, mathematics, philosophy, and law, given that opportunities to exercise these talents did not exist in the foraging lifestyle in which humans evolved and would not have parlayed themselves into advantages in survival and reproduction even if they did?” (Pinker, 2010:8993)
Bipedalism: New Fossil Evidence and Language Evolution
Published in Science today, 11.02.2011 (yey! palidromic date!) is a report on the find of a Complete Fourth Metatarsal and Arches in the Foot of Australopithecus afarensis.
New fossil evidence from Hadar, Ethiopia suggests that our ancestors from 3.2 million years ago (Australopithecus afarensis (better known as Lucy)) had arches in their feet.
Arched feet are an essential part of the bipedal way that modern humans walk.
Although the skeleton of Lucy was found in 1974, until now important foot bones in all of the specimens uncovered to date have made it difficult for researchers to understand precisely how well adapted for bipedalism a. afarensis were.
Why should people interested in Language Evolution care about bipedalism? Well, here’s some food for thought:
1) Bipedalism likely had an impact on our cognitive abilities. As climbing as a form of locomotion became less common, different ways to cognitively represent space and distance probably had to be found. These new systems could have involved imitation (mirror neuron alarm bells start ringing). By adding imitative abilities to already existing spacial awareness that are seen in modern, non-human primates, this may have created mechanisms which allowed hominins to visualise themselves walking across plains (McWhinney 2005). This may have been the original selective pressure for imitative ability and therefore could have some implications for the imitative abilities which exist within language.
2) Upright posture would free up forelimbs which may have had communicative advantages as it would free the hands up for gesture. This theory has been somewhat rubished in that the first apes to adapt a bipedal posture were probably cognitively not much different from today’s apes (assumed from evidence of skull size). However even if this was not the selective pressure FOR bipedalism it doesn’t stop it being relevant to the discussion.
3) Free hand movement would also lead to making tools. Stone tools getting more complex and language developing as evolution took place may show a close relationship between enhanced motor movement and language. Deficits in motor control are also often linked to aphasia so there is a strong connection between manual activity and speech communication.
4) When Chimpanzees and Gorillas are socializing in groups they go from a ‘knuckle walk’ to sitting in circles, this allows apes to keep eye contact with each other in social situations, bipedalism would also allow one to keep eye contact at all times, even when in motion, and so the this may have been a selective pressure. Stanford (2003)
5) Evolution of the cortico-striatal neural circuits (basal ganglia) that regulate human language may have been shaped by the demands of upright bipedal locomotion. (Lieberman, 2001)
A lot of this debate is quite controversial but I thought I’d put some thoughts/theories out there in celebration of exciting new finds!
References
Stanford, C. B. (2003). Upright: The evolutionary key to becoming human. New York: Houghton Mifflin
Imitation and Social Cognition in Humans and Chimpanzees (II): Rational Imitation in Human Infants and Human-Raised Chimps
In my last post I wrote about two experiments on imitation in young children and chimpanzees by Lyons et al. (2005) and Horner & Whiten (2005). Their results suggested that young children tend to copy both the ‘necessary’ and the ‘unnecessary’ parts of a demonstrator’s action who shows them how to get a reward out of a puzzle box, whereas chimps only copy the ones necessary to get the reward.
One important question raised by these experiments was whether these results can only be applied to wild chimpanzees or whether they also hold for enculturated, human-raised chimps. This is an important question because it is possible that chimpanzees raised in these kinds of richly interactive contexts show more sensitivity to human intentionality.
Buttelman et al. (2007) tested just that. They used the “rational imitation” paradigm, which features two conditions
a) the subjects are shown an action in which the specific manner of the action is not purposive and intentional but results from the demonstrator being occupied with something else. For example, he may be carrying something so that he has to use his foot to turn on a light (often called the Hands Occupied Condition).
b) the subjects are shown an action in which the demonstrator chooses a specific manner of doing something on purpose. For example he may have his hands free but still choosto turn on the light with his foot (Hands Free Condition).
taken from Call & Tomasello 2008
The Genesis of Grammar
In my previous post on linguistic replicators and major transitions, I mentioned grammaticalisation as a process that might inform us about the contentive-functional split in the lexicon. Naturally, it makes sense that grammaticalisation might offer insights into other transitions in linguistics, and, thanks to an informative comment from a regular reader, I was directed to a book chapter by Heine & Kuteva (2007): The Genesis of Grammar: On combining nouns. I might dedicate a post to the paper in the future, but, as with many previous claims, this probably won’t happen. So instead, here is the abstract and a table of the authors’ hypothesised grammatical innovations:
That it is possible to propose a reconstruction of how grammar evolved in human languages is argued for by Heine and Kuteva (2007). Using observations made within the framework of grammaticalization theory, these authors hypothesize that time-stable entities denoting concrete referential concepts, commonly referred to as ‘nouns’, must have been among the first items distinguished by early humans in linguistic discourse. Based on crosslinguistic findings on grammatical change, this chapter presents a scenario of how nouns may have contributed to introducing linguistic complexity in language evolution.
Prairie Dog Communication
A recent NPR radio show covered the research of the biosemiotician Con Slobodchikoff of the Univeristy of Arizone on prairie dog calls. The piece is very public-orientated, but still might be worth listening to.
We’ve all (I hope) heard of the vervet monkeys, which have different alarm calls for different predators, such as for leopard (Panthera pardus), martial eagle (Polemaetus bellicosus), and python (Python sebae). (Seyfarth et al. 1980) For each of these predators, an inherent and unlearned call is uttered by the first spectator, after which the vervet monkeys respond in a suitable manner – climb a tree, seek shelter, etc. It appears, however, that prairie dogs have a similar system, and that it is a bit more complicated.
Slobodchikoff conducted a study where three girls (probably underpaid, underprivaleged, and underappreciated (under)graduate students) walked through a prairie dog colony wearing shirts of the colors green, yellow, and blue. The call of the first prairie dog to notice them was recorded, after which the prairie dogs all fled into their burrows. The intern then walked through the entire colony, took a break for ten minutes, changed shirts, and did it again.
What is interesting is that the prairie dogs have significantly different calls (important, as they are pretty much exactly the same to human ears) for blue and yellow, but not for yellow and green. This is due to the dichromatic nature of praire dog eyesight (for a full study of the eyesight of retinal photoreceptors of subterranean rodents, consult Schleich et al. 2010). The distinction between blue and yellow is important, however, as there isn’t necessarily any reason that blue people are any more dangerous to praire dogs than yellow ones. “This in turn suggests that the prairie dogs are labeling the predators according to some cognitive category, rather than merely providing instructions on how to escape from a particular predator or responding to the urgency of a predator attack.” (Slobodchikoff 2009, pp. 438)
Another study was then done where two towers were built and a line was strung between them. When cut out shapes were slung down the line, the prairie dogs were able to distinguish a triangle from a circle, but not a circle from a square. So, the prairie dogs are not entirely perfect at encoding information. The conclusion still stands however that more information is encoded in the calls than is entirely relevant to a suitable reaction (unless one were to argue that evolutionary pressure existed on prairie dogs to distinguish blue predators from yellow ones.)
NPR labels this ‘prairiedogese’, which makes me shiver and reminds me of Punxatawney Pennsylvania, where Bill Murray was stuck on a vicious cycle in the movie Groundhog Day, forced every day to watch the mayor recite the translated proclamation of the Groundhog, which of course spoke in ‘groundhogese’. Luckily, however, there won’t be courses in this ‘language’.
References:
Schleich, C., Vielma, A., Glösmann, M., Palacios, A., & Peichl, L. (2010). Retinal photoreceptors of two subterranean tuco-tuco species (Rodentia, Ctenomys): Morphology, topography, and spectral sensitivity The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 518 (19), 4001-4015 DOI: 10.1002/cne.22440
Seyfarth, R., Cheney, D., & Marler, P. (1980). Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: evidence of predator classification and semantic communication Science, 210 (4471), 801-803 DOI: 10.1126/science.7433999
Slobodchikoff CN, Paseka A, & Verdolin JL (2009). Prairie dog alarm calls encode labels about predator colors. Animal cognition, 12 (3), 435-9 PMID: 19116730