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Posts

April 29, 2013

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2:23 PM | “Music and the Origins of Language. International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity”.
Find call for Participation below. “Music and the Origins of Language. International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity”. 15 – 20 September 2013, Cortona, Italy http://ai.vub.ac.be/events/cortona-2013 The Evolutionary Linguistics Association (ELA) is proud to announce its second summer school in Cortona on Music and the Origins of Language. The school is intended for read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

April 22, 2013

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12:08 PM | Numerical vs. analytical modelling
Multi-agent models have been a close companion of evolutionary linguistics since its resurgence in the 90s. (There’s too much fuzzy terminology in our field but for me this term subsumes the study of the evolution of Language with a capital L as well as language evolution, i.e. evolutionary approaches to language change.) I’d probably go read more...

Baronchelli, Andrea, Felici, Maddalena, Loreto, Vittorio, Caglioti, Emanuele & Steels, Luc (2006). Sharp transition towards shared vocabularies in multi-agent systems, Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2006 (06) DOI:

Jäger, Gerhard (2008). Language evolution and George Price’s “General Theory of Selection”, Language in flux: dialogue coordination, language variation, change and evolution, Communication, mind & language 1 53-80. Other: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~gjaeger/publications/leverhulme.pdf

Platt, John R (1964). Strong inference, Science, 146 (3642) 347-353. Other: 10.1126/science.146.3642.347

Nowak Martin A, Krakauer David C & Dress Andreas (1999). An error limit for the evolution of language, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 266 (1433) 2131-2136. PMID:

Nowak, Martin A, Komarova, Natalia L & Niyogi, Partha (2001). Evolution of universal grammar, Science, 291 (5501) 114-118. PMID:

Reali, Florencia & Griffiths, Thomas L (2009). Words as alleles: connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to models of genetic drift, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 277 (1680) 429-436. DOI:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

April 08, 2013

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8:02 AM | Iterated learning using Youtube videos and speech synthesis
This is a guest post by Justin Quillinan (of Chimp Challenge fame). Cast your reminisce pods back a few days and recall Sean’s iterated learning experiment using the automated transcription of YouTube videos. The process went as follows: 1. Record yourself saying something. 2. Upload the video to YouTube 3. Let it be automatically transcribed read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

April 05, 2013

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11:57 PM | Sticking the tongue out: Early imitation in infants
The nativism-empiricism debate haunts the fields of language acquisition and evolution on more than just one level. How much of children’s social and cognitive abilities have to be present at birth, what is acquired through experience, and therefore malleable? Classically, this debate resolves around the poverty of stimulus. How much does a child have to read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

April 02, 2013

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2:56 PM | Iterated learning using YouTube videos
I recently discovered that videos uploaded to YouTube are automatically transcribed (if they’re in English).  As you might guess, the transcriptions are not perfect, so there will be a discrepancy between what the speaker actually said and what is transcribed.  This is essentially all you need to run an iterated learning experiment (e.g. Kirby, Cornish read more...

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:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

March 15, 2013

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4:22 PM | More Language Evolution positions available
It’s job frenzy out there. You can see here seven postdoctoral positions in the Dutch research consortium ”Language in Interaction” including one on language evolution below: WP 5: Language evolution and diversity The goal of this WP is to contribute to a better understanding of the biological underpinnings of linguistic universality as well as diversity, both at read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

March 08, 2013

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8:54 AM | Positions available on major Research Project on Cultural and Cognitive Evolution
The university of St. Andrews is on a hiring frenzy: Applications are invited to join an interdisciplinary research programme directed by Professors Kevin Laland (School of Biology) and Andrew Whiten (School of Psychology and Neuroscience) at the University of St Andrews’ Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution. “Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Culture Complexity, Creativity and Trust” read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

March 07, 2013

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9:25 PM | Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses
Zach Weinersmith of SMBC comics and various science folk are putting on a Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses.  The festival will include presentations of “well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory”.  They’re looking for people to give 5 minute presentations.  It takes place at MIT on the 20th April, submissions are due read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

March 06, 2013

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11:19 AM | The Evolution of Speech: Lip-smacking monkeys
In January, Ghazanfar, Morrill & Kayser published a paper in PNAS entitled “Monkeys are perceptually tuned to facial expressions that exhibit a theta-like speech rhythm”. The abstract is below: Human speech universally exhibits a 3- to 8-Hz rhythm, corresponding to the rate of syllable production, which is reflected in both the sound envelope and the visual mouth read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

March 04, 2013

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12:23 PM | Culture – Language – Cognition: Special Issue of Pragmatics & Cognition on Dan Everett’s ‘Language: The Cultural Tool’
The 20th anniversary special commemorative issue of Pragmatics & Cognition features a number of interesting articles which comment on linguist Dan Everett‘s 2012 book “Language: The Cultural Tool“. In this book,  Everett, who is best known for his work on the indigenous language Pirahã,  argues for the important of culture and interaction and against the Chomskyan idea read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

March 01, 2013

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4:04 PM | A review of a review on Fitch’s The Evolution of Language
Maggie Tallerman has published a review of Techumseh Fitch’s 2010 book, “The Evolution of Language” in the journal of linguistics. It is largely very critical, mostly of Fitch’s ideas about a musical protolanguage stage preceding language, and of the fact that the focus of the book is largely about vocal imitation and the evolution of speech, rather than on linguistic read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 28, 2013

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5:26 PM | Whorfian economics reconsidered: Residuals and Causal Graphs
Yesterday I posted an analysis of some work by Prof. Keith Chen on the link between future tense marking and economic decisions.  Prof. Chen made some suggestions about changes to the analysis, some of which I’ve carried out here.  The new results below indicate that the link between future tense and the propensity to save read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 26, 2013

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1:58 PM | Whorfian economics reconsidered: Why future tense?
A recently accepted paper by Keith Chen has been getting a lot of press coverage. Chen has discovered a close link between the properties of the language people speak and their economic decisions. People who speak languages which mark the future tense differently to the present tense tend to make fewer provisions for the future. read more...

Sean Roberts & James Winters (2012). Social Structure and Language Structure: the New Nomothetic Approach, Psycology of Language Learning, 16 (2) 89-112. Other: 10.2478/v10057-012-0008-6

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

February 21, 2013

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5:05 PM | New paper on the emergence of hierarchical structure
After Berwick, Friederici, Chomsky, Bolhuis (2013) last month, Berwick has contributed to another paper featuring evidence from birdsong. Miyagawa, Berwick and Okanoya (2013) is published in frontiers of psychology here. Abstract below: We propose a novel account for the emergence of human language syntax. Like many evolutionary innovations, language arose from the adventitious combination of two read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 19, 2013

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3:53 PM | The 3rd annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution
There’s the European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association (EHBEA), the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), and the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) too. I’m reminded of the People’s Front of Judea. Anyway… the 3rd annual meeting of the ESHE will be held in Vienna, Austria, on 20-21 September, 2013. The meeting read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 14, 2013

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1:03 PM | In case of Neanderthal uprising…
Recently there’s been quite a bit of news about Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School wanting an adventurous woman to give birth to a Neanderthal baby. Though the quotes are now being said to be completely fabricated. However, this cropped up on Adam Van Arsdale’s blog today and I thought it funny enough to read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 12, 2013

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1:31 PM | The New Pluralistic Approach
There has been a lot of talk round these parts recently of the merits of pluralistic approaches to problems in language evolution, and condemning the assignment of too much explanatory power to statistical correlations away from other forms of evidence, such as cultural learning experiments. Sean and James recently published a paper about this here which includes some read more...

Selten, R. & Warglien, M. (2007). The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (18) 7361-7366. DOI:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

February 07, 2013

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11:53 PM | Sexually selective understanding of evolutionary psychology and its political implications
There is a “Skeptics In The Pub” event in Glasgow on March 4th, where Dr Thom Scott-Phillips will be discussing the perceptions and misconceptions of evolutionary psychology, in light of the public backlash against evolutionary psychology that seems to be increasing all the time. This kind of public engagement is very sorely needed if we read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
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11:53 PM | Sexually selective understanding of evolutionary psychology and its political applications
There is a “Skeptics In The Pub” event in Glasgow on March 4th, where Dr Thom Scott-Phillips will be discussing the perceptions and misconceptions of evolutionary psychology, in light of the public backlash against it that seems to be increasing all the time. This kind of public engagement is very sorely needed if we are read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 05, 2013

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8:48 AM | Chimp Challenge at Edinburgh Zoo
We’re used to thinking of ourselves as smarter than other animals, but sometimes it looks like even chimpanzees can outsmart us. A while ago, Justin Quillinan and I set up the Chimp Challenge. We were interested in a study by Inoue & Matsuzawa which demonstrated the amazing visual processing abilities of a chimpanzee named Ayumu. read more...

Inoue, S. & Matsuzawa, T. (2007). Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees, Current Biology, 17 (23) DOI:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation
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8:22 AM | 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, 14th – 17th April 2014, Vienna: Call for Papers
The 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language will take place in the beautiful capital of Austria, Vienna, from April 14th to April 17th 2014. The plenary speakers are: “Plenary Speakers Michael Arbib Rob Boyd Bill Croft Chris Knight and Jim Hurford Ann Senghas Joan Silk Kenny Smith“ The Call for Papers can be found here (Deadline for paper read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

January 18, 2013

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3:32 PM | Language Evolution 101: Gene’s Eye vs. DST
Broad hypothese are better than narrow ones as they can be applied to a wider range of things. That’s probably a controversial thing to say, but it’s certainly true that the beauty of most evolutionary theory lies in its simplicity, and therefore its ability to be applied to more than just biology. So how do read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

January 17, 2013

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1:23 PM | Most important paper on cultural evolution that includes acacia trees published
Last month saw the publication of a paper by James and I (our first paper!) on the so-called ‘nomothetic’ approach to links between language structure and social structure.  In it we review the recent trend of using large-scale cross-cultural statistical analyses to find links between cultural traits and social structures (e.g. Lupyan & Dale, 2010).  read more...

Sean Roberts & James Winters (2012). Social Structure and Language Structure: the New Nomothetic Approach, Psycology of Language Learning, 16 (2) 89-112. Other: 10.2478/v10057-012-0008-6

Lupyan G & Dale R (2010). Language structure is partly determined by social structure., PloS one, 5 (1) PMID:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

January 15, 2013

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3:58 PM | Evolution in a Changing Environment
Following on from the Baronchelli et al paper a couple of months ago, PLOS ONE has published  ”Evolution in a Changing Environment” by the same authors. The conclusions of the 2 papers both argue that if language is rapidly changing (and it is), then generalist, neutral genes, rather than specialist ones, are advantageous. This argues that language is read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

January 12, 2013

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11:15 AM | Berwick, Friederici, Chomsky, Bolhuis (2013): Evolution, brain, and the nature of language
Noam Chomsky, who infamously stated that the field of language evolution research is “a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense” (see, e.g. here), has a new paper on the topic in press (together with linguist Robert Berwick and neuroscientists Angela Friederici and Johan Bolhuis) called Evolution, brain, and the nature of language (here, read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

December 30, 2012

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5:30 PM | Corpus Linguistics, Literary Studies, and Description
One of my main hobbyhorses these days is description. Literary studies has to get a lot more sophisticated about description, which is mostly taken for granted and so is not done very rigorously. There isn’t even a sense that there’s something there to be rigorous about. Perhaps corpus linguistics is a way to open up read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

December 17, 2012

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5:31 PM | Literary History, the Future: Kemp Malone, Corpus Linguistics, Digital Archaeology, and Cultural Evolution
In scientific prognostication we have a condition analogous to a fact of archery—the farther back you draw your longbow, the farther ahead you can shoot. – Buckminster Fuller The following remarks are rather speculative in nature, as many of my remarks tend to be. I’m sketching large conclusions on the basis of only a few read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

December 16, 2012

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8:09 AM | 3rd Linguistic Conference for Doctoral Students: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Discourse, and Culture
Here’s a link to another conference that might be of interest: The 3rd Linguistic Conference for Doctoral Students will take place at Heidelberg University, Germany from 05.-06. April 2013. The overarching topic of the conference will be: “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Discourse, and Culture.” The deadline for submissions is 15 February. I’ve included the Call for read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

December 09, 2012

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9:52 AM | Ways to protolanguage conference
The third Ways to Protolanguage conference has released its call for papers.  It will take place in Wrocław, Poland from 25–26 May.  The deadline for submission is 31 March. Plenary speakers include Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Robin Dunbar,  Peter Gärdenfors, Josep Call  and Tomasz P. Krzeszowski. More details on the website here: http://www.wsf.edu.pl/57793.xml  
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

November 26, 2012

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10:55 AM | The Role of Foreigner-Directed Speech in Language Evolution
After all of this talk of spurious cross-cultural correlations it might be time to direct the discussion back to ways to resolve an over-reliance on statistical tendencies. Sean and James did a workshop on this at this year’s EvoLang about how constructive, idiographic and experimental approaches also need to be considered when investigating how linguistic and social structure are linked. read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
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