Journal of Language Evolution最新文献

{"title":"Studying language evolution in the age of big data","authors":"Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Nancy Retzlaff, Damián E. Blasi, W. Bruce Croft, Michael Cysouw, D. Hruschka, I. Maddieson, Lydia Müller, E. Smith, P. Stadler, George Starostin, Hyejin Youn","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZY004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZY004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The increasing availability of large digital corpora of cross-linguistic data is revolutionizing many branches of linguistics. Overall, it has triggered a shift of attention from detailed questions about individual features to more global patterns amenable to rigorous, but statistical, analyses. This engenders an approach based on successive approximations where models with simplified assumptions result in frameworks that can then be systematically refined, always keeping explicit the methodological commitments and the assumed prior knowledge. Therefore, they can resolve disputes between competing frameworks quantitatively by separating the support provided by the data from the underlying assumptions. These methods, though, often appear as a ‘black box’ to traditional practitioners. In fact, the switch to a statistical view complicates comparison of the results from these newer methods with traditional understanding, sometimes leading to misinterpretation and overly broad claims. We describe here this evolving methodological shift, attributed to the advent of big, but often incomplete and poorly curated data, emphasizing the underlying similarity of the newer quantitative to the traditional comparative methods and discussing when and to what extent the former have advantages over the latter. In this review, we cover briefly both randomization tests for detecting patterns in a largely model-independent fashion and phylolinguistic methods for a more model-based analysis of these patterns. We foresee a fruitful division of labor between the ability to computationally process large volumes of data and the trained linguistic insight identifying worthy prior commitments and interesting hypotheses in need of comparison.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZY004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46793628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What smartphone apps may contribute to language evolution research","authors":"O. Morin, James Winters, Thomas F. Müller, T. Morisseau, Christian Etter, Simon J. Greenhill","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZY005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZY005","url":null,"abstract":"Unlike a standard online experiment, a gaming app lets participants interact freely with a vast number of partners, as many times as they wish. The gain is not merely one of statistical power. Cultural evolutionists can use gaming apps to allow large numbers of participants to communicate synchronously; to build realistic transmission chains that avoid the losses of information that occurs in linear chains; to study the effects of partner choice as well as partner control in social interactions. We are releasing an app designed to take advantage of these opportunities and generate realistic language evolution dynamics.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZY005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49286723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Of Tongues and Men: A Review of Morphological Evidence for the Evolution of Language","authors":"Lou Albessard-Ball, A. Balzeau","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZY001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZY001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":"3 1","pages":"79-89"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZY001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61538806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ancient DNA and language evolution: A special section","authors":"A. Benítez‐Burraco, D. Dediu","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX024","url":null,"abstract":"About a year or so ago, prompted by what seemed (and still does) to be a flood of new methods and findings stemming from the extraction, analysis and interpretation of more and more ancient genomes, both from archaic (Neanderthals and Denisovans) and modern (but long dead) humans, we thought that it is becoming necessary to have a collection of papers looking into the implications for language origins and evolution. Thus, the idea of a special issue on ancient DNA emerged, we dully contacted groups and individual scientists working on these issues, and we soon had an impressive lineup of contributors and contributions. However, due to the extremely dynamic nature of the field and the multiple constraints to which our contributors have to face, we decided to rather have a continuously running series of ‘special sections’ containing contributions touching upon these issues as they arrive, instead of waiting for all contributions to be assembled into a dedicated ‘special issue’. The first four contributions follow, ranging from setting the wider background to focusing on specific genes, and touching not only on ancient DNA but also on genetic data from living humans and even on the archeological and paleoanthropological record. The papers originate from well-known groups and scientists and, despite their diversity, they contribute to setting the foundations for the proper, contextualized, and nuanced interpretation of the new findings that are bound to continue coming, as well as suggesting new methods, data sources and interpretative frameworks that should help our field advance. We begin with Hayley Susan Mountford and Dianne Newbury, geneticists with long-term interests in language at Oxford Brookes University in the UK, whose ‘The Genomic Landscape of Language Disorders: Insights into Evolution’ provides the necessary background for discussing the genetic foundations of language and speech and the interpretation of data from ancient genomes. Their conclusion that ‘[w]e are only just beginning to unravel the highly complex developmental processes that underlie speech in modern humans, and should be extremely cautious in extrapolating any findings into hominins’, far from being pessimistic, must instead form the backbone for any attempts at linking genetics (not only ancient) to theories of language origins and evolution. In ‘What aDNA can (and cannot) tell us about the emergence of language and speech’, Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall, a molecular systematics/comparative genomics expert and a palaeoanthropologist with a long history of work on language origins with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, join forces to discuss the questions that ancient DNA may (and may not) answer when it comes to language origins and evolution, to militate for properly placing such findings against the background provided by paleoanthropology and archeology, and to propose an actual method for identifying genes that may be involved in the evolution o","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":"3 1","pages":"47-48"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX024","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61537412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The genomic landscape of language: Insights into evolution","authors":"H. Mountford, D. Newbury","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX019","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of severe, monogenic forms of language disorders have revealed important insights into the mechanisms that underpin language development and evolution. It is clear that monogenic mutations in genes such as FOXP2 and CNTNAP2 only account for a small proportion of language disorders seen in children, and the genetic basis of language in modern humans is highly complex and poorly understood. In this review, we examine why we understand so little of the genetic landscape of language disorders, and how the genetic background of an individual greatly affects the way in which a genetic change is expressed. We discuss how the underlying genetics of language disorders has informed our understanding of language evolution, and how recent advances may obtain a clearer picture of language capacity in ancient hominins.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":"9 1","pages":"49-58"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61534615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The role of pantomime in gestural language evolution, its cognitive bases and an alternative","authors":"E. Abramova","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":"3 1","pages":"26-40"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61535511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A statistical model for the joint inference of vertical stability and horizontal diffusibility of typological features","authors":"Yugo Murawaki, Kenji Yamauchi","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX022","url":null,"abstract":"A major pursuit within the study of language evolution is to advance understanding of the historical behavior of typological features. Previous studies have identified at least three factors that determine the typological similarity of a pair of languages: (1) vertical stability, (2) horizontal diffusibility, and (3) uni-versality. Of these factors, the first two are of particular interest. Although observed data are affected by all three factors to a greater or lesser degree, previous studies have not jointly modeled them in a straightforward manner. Here, we propose a solution that is derived from the field of cultural anthropology. We present a simple and extensible Bayesian autologistic model to jointly infer the three factors from observed data. Although a large number of missing values in the dataset pose serious difficulties for statistical modeling, the proposed model can robustly estimate these parameters as well as missing values. Applying missing value imputation to indirectly evaluate the estimated parameters, we quantitatively demonstrated that they were meaningful. In conclusion, we briefly compare our findings with those of previous studies and discuss future directions.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":"3 1","pages":"13-25"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61536499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In support of the role of pantomime in language evolution","authors":"M. Arbib","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX023","url":null,"abstract":"I thank Ekaterina Abramova (2018) for using my Mirror System Hypothesis (MSH) of ‘how the brain got language’ as the grounding for her thoughtful critique of pantomime. In her abstract, she asserts that ‘the notion of a pantomime [in MSH] presupposes two sophisticated abilities that themselves are left unexplained: symbolization and intentional communication’. She offers ontogenetic ritualization (OR) as ‘an alternative mechanism that can lead to a suitably complex language precursor while avoiding pantomime altogether’ (emphasis added). I will defend the merits of pantomime while showing that OR is better regarded as a complement to pantomime than as a plausible replacement.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":"3 1","pages":"41-44"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61537869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Different kinds of parsimony: association-learning versus bodily mimesis","authors":"J. Zlatev","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZY003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZY003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":"3 1","pages":"45-46"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZY003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61538823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Scala naturae: The impact of historical values on current ‘evolution of language’ discourse","authors":"Robert Ullrich, Moritz Mittelbach, K. Liebal","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":"3 1","pages":"1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61534502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}