Posts

March 21, 2012

+

8:28 AM | Evolang Coverage: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s plenary talk

Post by Bodo Winter: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s talk at this Evolang gave an impressively confident and forceful argument for linguistic nativism. The basic tenets of the Chomskyan view of language evolution were reiterated with some old and some new arguments along the way. Piattelli-Palmarini (P.P.) claimed that (1) language is modular and autonomous from other cognitive [...]

+

5:23 AM | Comic suggests ‘putting down’ old physicists-turned-linguists

I seem to be the comic poster on this blog, but hey – Mark Liberman often quotes comics on Languagelog, and it’s before breakfast for me. So I feel ok with that. Anyway, I was reading Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal this morning, a comic that is occasionally quite good, and I came upon this gem. [...]

March 20, 2012

+

7:49 PM | google95b735d31b2a3835

google-site-verification: google95b735d31b2a3835.html Filed under: Uncategorized

+

6:12 PM | Nothing in Language Makes Sense…

… Except in the Light of Biological and Cultural Evolution Sean mentioned in one of his many Evolang posts that, based on de Boer’s talk, the real audience for researchers of cultural evolution should be biologists. Well, deciding that actions plus words can work far better together, I decided to get in contact with Jeremy [...]

+

12:44 PM | On Interacting with People Online

A recent blog post by Puffles’ bestest buddy motivated me to put down my own principles of online social behaviour – mostly because Bestest Buddy’s approach is very similar to my own. I’ve also been thinking about these issues after reading a recent post by pme200. (If you are on Twitter, you should follow both.) [...]

+

9:12 AM | Evolang coverage: More on linguistic replicators

Monica Tamariz presented a poster at Evolang (runner up for the best poster award) about linguistic replicators. This is an alternative view to Andrew Smith’s talk and Bill Benzon’s post on the same subject. Below I’ve copied out sections of Tamariz’s poster: Maye J, Werker JF, & Gerken L (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information [...]

Maye J, Werker JF & Gerken L (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination., Cognition, 82 (3) -11. PMID: 11747867

Citation

March 19, 2012

+

5:31 PM | Evolang Coverage: Honest signalling between plants and insects

Yashuiro Suzuki (from Nagoya University, co-authoring with Megumi Sakai and Kazuhiro Adachi) presents a model of the evolution of an honest signalling system between plants and insects. While honest signalling systems have been studied before, this was the first I harve heard of one between species, and certainly between kingdoms. The vast majority of animals [...]

March 17, 2012

+

3:49 AM | Evolang coverage: Network structure and the effect of L2 learners on language change

Evolang is over, but I have a backlog of posts to get out! The idea that language change can be biased by the cognitive profiles of its learners has attracted a lot of interest (see Hanna’s post), and was a frequent topic of discussion at Evolang. In the talk by James Winters and I, we [...]

March 15, 2012

+

6:38 PM | Evolang Coverage: Simon Fisher: Molecular Windows into Speech and Language

In his clear and engaging plenary talk, Simon Fisher, who is director of the Department “Language & Genetics” at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands, gave a summary of the current state of research on what molecular biology and genetics can contribute to the question of language evolution. Fisher was involved in the discovery of [...]

+

6:28 PM | In Search of the Wild Replicator

The key to the treasure is the treasure. – John Barth In view of Sean’s post about Andrew Smith’s take on linguistic replicators I’ve decided to repost this rather longish note from New Savanna. I’d orignally posted it in the Summer of 2010 as part of a run-up to a post on cultural evolution for [...]

+

4:59 PM | Zeno

Many people are familiar with Zeno's paradox, though probably not in the form presented by XKCD: (If you aren't familiar with it or need a refresher, just follow the link above.) Perhaps this is widely known, but I only recently discovered what the point of Zeno's paradox was: he was trying to prove that motion is impossible. Nothing ever moves and nothing ever changes. This probably sounds absurd, but it was the basis of a philosophical school of which Zeno was part. Zeno created a number [...]

+

9:02 AM | EvoLang coverage: Boeckx on integrating biolingustics and cultural evolution

Cedric Boeckx gave a remarkable plenary which tried to pull together the fields of cultural language evolution and biolinguistics, with surprising concessions on either side. Boeckx started from a relatively uncontroversial part of Chomsky’s claim: That aspects of language can be studied scientifically as part of biology. However, Boeckx noted that Luria in 1976 was [...]

March 14, 2012

+

11:37 PM | Evolang Coverage: Luke McCrohan on horizontal transfer

Luke McCrohon suggests that tools from evolutionary biology can be applied to linguistic borrowing between languages. McCrohon correctly points out that the descent of lexicons are far from tree-like, and there is a great deal of horizontal transfer (see also my post on analysing an etymology dictionary). Although it’s mainly nouns that are borrowed into [...]

+

11:29 PM | Evolang coverage: Andrew Smith: Linguistic replicators are not observable, nor replicators

Andrew Smith asks what are Darwinian linguistic replicators. He starts with Croft’s conception of the lingueme. Croft says that linguemes are external manifestations: utterances including their full context. However, this might mean that they are not observable, since we can’t observe the full context of an utterance nor the speaker’s intention. Furthermore, this ignores the [...]

+

1:12 AM | So, what is it then, this Grammaticalization?

A century ago Antoine Meillet, in his work L’évolution des Formes Grammaticales, coined the term grammaticalization to describe the process through which linguistic forms evolve from a lexical to a grammatical status. Even though knowledge of this process is found in earlier works by French and British philosophers (e.g. Condillac, 1746; Tooke, 1857), as well [...]

Kurylowicz, J. (1965). The Evolution of Grammatical Categories, Diogenes, 13 (51) 55-71. DOI: 10.1177/039219216501305105

Citation

March 13, 2012

+

11:45 PM | Evolang coverage: Brain activity during the emergence of a grounded communication game

Takeshi Konno, Junya Morita and Takashi Hashimoto talk about the integrative approach to the emergence of symbolic communication. The talk included details of a hybrid model of cognition for communication that involved a context-free grammar to handle denotation and a neural network to handle connotation. However, the most interesting work was an analysis of the [...]

+

11:19 PM | Evolang coverage: Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language

Are there more differences or more similarities between human language and other animal communication systems? And what exactly does it tell us if we find precursors and convergent evolution of aspects similar to human language? These were some of the key questions at this year’s Evolang’s Animal Communication and Language Evolution Workshop (proceedings for all workshops [...]

+

3:55 PM | Evolang coverage: Bart de Boer on Fact-free science

This is written at 1am after a sake and sushi reception. I have to praise the organisation of the conference so far! Kicking off the workshop on Constructive approaches to Language Evolution (proceedings for all workshops downloadable here), Bart de Boer talked about the dangers of Fact-free science. Maynard-Smith recognised of a certain kind of [...]

March 12, 2012

+

1:00 PM | Color illusion -- too cool to believe

By far the most striking visual illusion I've ever seen. A little bit of color after-effect turns a black-and-white photograph into a vivid color photograph. You may have to do it a few times to convince yourself it is real.

March 10, 2012

+

1:29 PM | Evolang Previews: Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot. Michael Pleyer Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, [...]

March 08, 2012

+

1:59 PM | Conference session on Theory and evidence in language evolution research

The 43rd Poznań Linguistic Meeting is holding a thematic session on Theory and evidence in language evolution research. The call is still open, but the deadline is the 15th March. From the conference description: The aims of the session can be summarised as follows: to assess the present range of available evidence and to discuss [...]

March 07, 2012

+

6:15 PM | Results: Replication in Psychology

My paper with Adena Schachner on replication in psychology is now published. The paper contains 3 main sections: a reasonably thorough literature review on replication rates in psychology, a proposal as to how to improve replication rates (primarily through tracking replication rates), and the results of a survey of psychologists on replication practices (many thanks to all who participated). The results of the survey was that while not nearly enough replications are attempted, there are [...]

+

3:14 PM | Evolang Previews: The nomothetic approach to language evolution

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot. Sean Roberts & James Winters Constructing [...]

+

7:31 AM | Crows

I was sitting around on a park bench somewhere between Shibuya and Shinjuku, killing time between editing my talk slides and actually going to Evolang in Kyoto. I had worked 17 hours on the computer the day before, and had worked around five hours that morning and afternoon, and this was my time to relax [...]

March 06, 2012

+

6:37 PM | Using tools from evolutionary biology in cultural evolution

Levinson & Gray (2012) demonstrate how tools from evolutionary biology can help refine the way we look at human language and human cognition. Phylogenetic techniques allow researchers to properly control for the fact that languages are related by descent. More importantly, these tools allow the study of the full variation of linguistic structures, rather than [...]

Levinson, S. & Gray, R. (2012). Tools from evolutionary biology shed new light on the diversification of languages, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16 (3) 167-173. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2012.01.007

Citation

+

10:21 AM | Evolang Previews: The Evolution of Morphological Agreement

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot. Richard Littauer The Evolution of Morphological Agreement Every [...]

March 04, 2012

+

3:33 PM | Pilot data

I am back from a long semi-silence.I have been trying to finish up a number of projects, which gives me less time to write. Speaking of… One of the focuses of my work is figuring out how children learn the meaning of verbs. This is made more complicated by the fact that we don't actually have completely solid and uncontroversial definitions of verbs. If we don't know what verbs mean, how can we tell when a child has successfully learned them? I am working on a large scale project to get [...]

March 01, 2012

+

8:00 PM | I’m Losing my Science Blogging Edge

Increasing numbers of Language Evolution bloggers are pre-doctorate students. How must the older net generation feel? Perhaps like the young upstarts have too much time on their hands … Yes, it’s a parody of the LCD soundsystem song. Yes, that’s the Laughing Man icon. The video was made using the Laughing Man RSS ticker I [...]

February 29, 2012

+

2:30 PM | Cultural transmission in flies

Hat-tip to SK for this. Two recent papers demonstrate that cultural evolution can be studied in the common fly. Battesti et al. (2012) show that Drosophila use social information when deciding where to lay their eggs: “Taken altogether, these experiments show that D. melanogaster rely more heavily on social information than on personal information when both [...]

Ruedi Stoop, Patrick Nüesch, Ralph Lukas Stoop, Leonid Bunimovich (2012). Fly out-smarts man, Populations and Evolution, Other: 1202.5913v1

Battesti, M., Moreno, C., Joly, D. & Mery, F. (2012). Spread of Social Information and Dynamics of Social Transmission within Drosophila Groups, Current Biology, 22 (4) 309-313. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.12.050

Citation

February 27, 2012

+

1:35 PM | Evolang previews: Holistic or synthetic protolanguage: evidence from iterated learning of whistled signals

Guest post by Tessa Verhoef Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot. Tessa [...]

Kirby, S., Cornish, H. & Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (31) 10681-10686. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707835105

Tallerman, M. (2007). Did our ancestors speak a holistic protolanguage?, Lingua, 117 (3) 579-604. DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2005.05.004

Citation

March 21, 2012

March 20, 2012

March 19, 2012

March 17, 2012

March 15, 2012

March 14, 2012

March 13, 2012

March 12, 2012

March 10, 2012

March 08, 2012

March 07, 2012

March 06, 2012

March 04, 2012

March 01, 2012

February 29, 2012

February 27, 2012

Posts with Citations

User Activity