Tue 14th January, 11-12.30, M3 Appleton Tower

The lexicon as a dynamical system: Lexical competition and the evolution of phoneme inventories

Andrew Wedel (University of Arizona)

All human languages make use of small systems of signal categories, such as the sounds [p] and [b], in combination to compose meaningful lexical categories, such as the words ‘pat’ and ‘bat’. These perceptually contrastive, yet individually meaningless signal categories are often called phonemes. Over time, the properties of and number of categories within phoneme systems change, but little is understood about what drives and constrains this process. However, recent evolutionary models of language change that treat language as a complex dynamical system provide an exciting new set of testable hypotheses, based on the proposal that long-term language change is ultimately driven by biases operating at the level of individuals interacting with individual utterances. While there are potentially many such biases, we focus on a bias against lexical confusability as a model system. A bias against lexical confusability provides a particularly rich model because the lexicon of each language is distinct, with the result that predictions for individual languages are also distinct. Because of the large range of relevant time-scales, we use multiple approaches to test scale-specific hypotheses. In this talk, I will review (i) a cross-linguistic study showing that the probability of historical loss of a phoneme is inversely correlated with its role in disambiguating words, (ii) a corpus study of natural speech showing that phoneme tokens that play a larger role in lexical disambiguation are hyperarticulated, and (iii) a game-based laboratory model showing that phonemes become more or less hyperarticulated over the course of two days in correlation with their disambiguating role in the task. All these findings are predicted by the hypothesis that utterance-level micro-changes compound to produce macro-changes over generations.

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »

---