Journal of Language Evolution最新文献_第9页

Introduction to the special issue on the emergence of sound systems 介绍关于音响系统出现的特刊

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-06-26 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZX014

H. Little

引用次数: 0

Language for $200: Success in the environment influences grammatical alignment 200美元的语言：在环境中的成功影响语法对齐

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-01-26 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZW012

S. Lev-Ari, S. Peperkamp

{"title":"Language for $200: Success in the environment influences grammatical alignment","authors":"S. Lev-Ari, S. Peperkamp","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZW012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZW012","url":null,"abstract":"Speakers constantly learn language from the environment by sampling their linguistic input and ad-justing their representations accordingly. Logically, people should attend more to the environment and adjust their behavior in accordance with it more the lower their success in the environment is. We test whether the learning of linguistic input follows this general principle in two studies: a corpus analysis of a TV game show, Jeopardy, and a laboratory task modeled after Go Fish. We show that lower (non-linguistic) success in the task modulates learning of and reliance on linguistic patterns in the environment. In Study 1, we ﬁnd that poorer performance increases conformity with linguistic norms, as reﬂected by increased preference for frequent grammatical structures. In Study 2, which consists of a more interactive setting, poorer performance increases learning from the immediate social environment, as reﬂected by greater repetition of others’ grammatical structures. We propose that these results have implications for models of language production and language learning and for the propagation of language change. In particular, they suggest that linguistic changes might spread more quickly in times of crisis, or when the gap between more and less successful people is larger. The results might also suggest that innovations stem from successful individuals while their propagation would depend on relatively less successful individuals. We provide a few historical examples that are in line with the ﬁrst suggested implication, namely, that the spread of linguistic changes is accelerated during difﬁcult times, such as war time and an economic downturn.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2017-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZW012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47512896","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}

引用次数: 1

Phoneme inventory size and the transition from monoplanar to dually patterned speech 音素存量大小与从单面语音到双模式语音的过渡

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-01-01 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZX010

Luke Fleming

{"title":"Phoneme inventory size and the transition from monoplanar to dually patterned speech","authors":"Luke Fleming","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX010","url":null,"abstract":"Atkinson (2011) shows that phoneme inventories are largest in Africa and smaller elsewhere, and suggests that this clinal distribution reﬂects a serial founder effect of human migrations out of Africa. Because of the way in which velaric ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanisms combine to create extra-large consonant inventories, click languages have the largest phoneme inventories of all. Critics question why phoneme inventory size, but not other properties of language, should leave a trace of the origin and dispersal of natural language. This article argues that the ﬁrst modern human languages would likely have had very large phoneme inventories if we assume, following Hockett’s work (1960), that duality of patterning was the last ‘design feature’ of language to emerge. The diachronic trajectories of sign languages and writing systems illustrate that dually patterned phonologies are often preceded by a stage in which minimal units of form map directly onto semantic functions. Following Hjelmslev (1961), I label such linguistic systems, ‘monoplanar’. The article critiques language origins theories that have claimed that click consonants were sounds employed in the development of human speech because of their putatively iconic or sound symbolic properties. Focusing on the structural effects of velaric ingressives for phoneme inventory size, I argue that clicks would have been essential in elaborating large inventories, and thus large vocabularies, in monoplanar spoken languages not because of any inherently iconic properties, but because of their capacity to multiply phonemic distinctions by combining with accompaniments produced via the pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. The contemporary distribution of phonemic clicks offers support for the hypothesis, as genetic studies increasingly point to an Eastern or Southern African origin for modern humans, while phonemic clicks have an areal but non-genetically restricted distribution in overlap-ping vicinities.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61534405","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}

引用次数: 8

Structure and abstraction in phonetic computation: Learning to generalise among concurrent acquisition problems 语音计算中的结构与抽象:在并发习得问题中学习泛化

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-01-01 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZX013

Bill D. Thompson, B. D. Boer

{"title":"Structure and abstraction in phonetic computation: Learning to generalise among concurrent acquisition problems","authors":"Bill D. Thompson, B. D. Boer","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX013","url":null,"abstract":"Sound systems vary dramatically in their lower-level details as a result of cultural evolution, but the presence of systematic organisation is universal. Why does variation pattern differently at these two levels of abstraction, and what can this tell us about the cognitive mechanisms that underpin human acquisition of speech? We explore an evolutionary rationale for the proposal that human learning extends to, and is perhaps even specialised for, making inferences at the higher-order level of abstraction. The ability to infer systematicity from distributional cues, by identifying signatures of structural homogeneity and anticipating subtle exceptions, can bootstrap lower-level learning, and is not subject to the moving target problem, a major evolutionary objection to specialisation in speech cognition. We examine this idea from a statistical perspective, by studying the representational assumptions that underpin generalisation among concurrent phonetic category induction problems. We present a probabilistic model for jointly inferring individual sound classes and a system-wide blue-print for the balance of shared and idiosyncratic structure among these classes. These models lead us to an evolutionary conjecture: culture pushes cognitive adaptation up the hierarchy of abstraction in learning","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61534450","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}

引用次数: 7

What phoneme networks tell us about the age of language families 音素网络告诉我们语言家族的年龄

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-01-01 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZX007

Roland Mühlenbernd, Taraka Rama

引用次数: 1

Anatomical biasing and clicks: Evidence from biomechanical modeling 解剖偏置和点击:来自生物力学模型的证据

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-01-01 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZX004

S. Moisik, D. Dediu

引用次数: 31

Measuring rhythmic complexity: A primer to quantify and compare temporal structure in speech, movement, and animal vocalizations 测量节奏复杂性:量化和比较语言、运动和动物发声的时间结构的入门

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-01-01 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZX002

A. Ravignani, Philipp Norton

{"title":"Measuring rhythmic complexity: A primer to quantify and compare temporal structure in speech, movement, and animal vocalizations","authors":"A. Ravignani, Philipp Norton","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZX002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZX002","url":null,"abstract":"Research on the evolution of human speech and phonology benefits from the comparative approach: structural, spectral, and temporal features can be extracted and compared across species in an attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary history of human speech. Here we focus on analytical tools to measure and compare temporal structure in human speech and animal vocalizations. We introduce the reader to a range of statistical methods usable, on the one hand, to quantify rhythmic complexity in single vocalizations, and on the other hand, to compare rhythmic structure between multiple vocalizations. These methods include: time series analysis, distributional measures, variability metrics, Fourier transform, autoand cross-correlation, phase portraits, and circular statistics. Using computer-generated data, we apply a range of techniques, walking the reader through the necessary software and its functions. We describe which techniques are most appropriate to test particular hypotheses on rhythmic structure, and provide possible interpretations of the tests. These techniques can be equally well applied to find rhythmic structure in gesture, movement, and any other behavior developing over time, when the research focus lies on its temporal structure. This introduction to quantitative techniques for rhythm and timing analysis will hopefully spur additional comparative research, and will produce comparable results across all disciplines working on the evolution of speech, ultimately advancing the field.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZX002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61534315","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}

引用次数: 35

Category competition as a driver of category contrast 品类竞争是品类对比的驱动因素

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-01-01 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZX009

A. Wedel, I. Fatkullin

引用次数: 10

Divergent acoustic properties of gelada and baboon vocalizations and their implications for the evolution of human speech. gelada和baboon发声的不同声学特性及其对人类语言进化的影响。

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2017-01-01 Epub Date: 2017-06-26 DOI: 10.1093/jole/lzx015

Morgan L Gustison, Thore J Bergman

{"title":"Divergent acoustic properties of gelada and baboon vocalizations and their implications for the evolution of human speech.","authors":"Morgan L Gustison, Thore J Bergman","doi":"10.1093/jole/lzx015","DOIUrl":"10.1093/jole/lzx015","url":null,"abstract":"Human speech has many complex spectral and temporal features traditionally thought to be absent in the vocalizations of other primates. Recent explorations of the vocal capabilities of non-human primates are challenging this view. Here, we continue this trend by exploring the spectro-temporal properties of gelada (Theropithecus gelada) vocalizations. First, we made cross-species comparisons of geladas, chacma baboons, and human vowel space area. We found that adult male and female gelada exhaled grunts-a call type shared with baboons-have formant profiles that overlap more with human vowel space than do baboon grunts. These gelada grunts also contained more modulation of fundamental and formant frequencies than did baboon grunts. Second, we compared formant profiles and modulation of exhaled grunts to the derived call types (those not shared with baboons) produced by gelada males. These derived calls contained divergent formant profiles, and a subset of them, notably wobbles and vocalized yawns, were more modulated than grunts. Third, we investigated the rhythmic patterns of wobbles, a call type shown previously to contain cycles that match the 3-8 Hz tempo of speech. We use a larger dataset to show that the wobble rhythm overlaps more with speech rhythm than previously thought. We also found that variation in cycle duration depends on the production modality; specifically, exhaled wobbles were produced at a slower tempo than inhaled wobbles. Moreover, the variability in cycle duration within wobbles aligns with a linguistic property known as 'Menzerath's law' in that there was a negative association between cycle duration and wobble size (i.e. the number of cycles). Taken together, our results add to growing evidence that non-human primates are anatomically capable of producing modulated sounds. Our results also support and expand on current hypotheses of speech evolution, including the 'neural hypothesis' and the 'bimodal speech rhythm hypothesis'.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6681840/pdf/lzx015.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41215095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Beyond cognacy: historical relations between words and their implication for phylogenetic reconstruction 超越同源:单词之间的历史关系及其对系统发育重建的影响

IF 2.6

Journal of Language Evolution Pub Date : 2016-07-01 DOI: 10.1093/JOLE/LZW006

Johann-Mattis List

{"title":"Beyond cognacy: historical relations between words and their implication for phylogenetic reconstruction","authors":"Johann-Mattis List","doi":"10.1093/JOLE/LZW006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOLE/LZW006","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the terminology and the processes underlying the fundamental historical relations between words in linguistics ( cognacy ) and genes in biology ( homology ). The comparison between linguistics and biology shows that there are major inconsistencies in the analogies drawn between the two research fields and the models applied in phylogenetic reconstruction in linguistics. Cognacy between words is treated as a binary relation which is either present or not. Words, however, can exhibit different degrees of cognacy which go beyond the distinction between orthologous and paralogous genes in biology. The complex nature of cognacy has strong implications for the models used for phylogenetic reconstruction. Instead of modeling lexical evolution as a process of cognate gain and cognate loss, we need to go beyond the cognate relation and develop models which take the degrees of cognacy into account. This opts for the use of evolutionary models which handle multistate characters and allow to define potentially asymmetrical transition tendencies among the character states instead of time-reversible binary state models in phylogenetic approaches. The benefit of multistate models with asymmetric transition tendencies is demonstrated by testing how well different models of lexical change perform in semantic reconstruction on a lexicostatistical dataset of 23 Chinese dialects in a parsimony framework. The results show that the improved models largely outperform the popular gain–loss models. This suggests that improved models of lexical change may have strong consequences for phylogenetic approaches in linguistics.","PeriodicalId":37118,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Evolution","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2016-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/JOLE/LZW006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"61533903","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}

引用次数: 35