Hi Everyone,
Tomorrow, our visiting PhD student Maria Grazia Rossi will be giving the LEC talk.
Tuesday 1st November, 11.00-12.30
DHT Conference Room
Against Identification of Language Change and Language Evolution
The idea that learnability, cultural stability and transmissibility of
languages are basic constraints to understanding the issues of the
evolution and origins of the complex human linguistic structures is a
very promising idea in the field of evolutionary linguistics. Adopting
this point of view, most scholars argue that (1) what matters in the
explanation of language evolution are the changes of linguistic
structures in the historical time and that so (2) language itself must
be considered primarily as a cultural adaptation. I critically discuss
a specific assumption behind this argument, namely the thesis of the
identification of language change and language evolution. And I will
tackle this issue by focusing my attention on the wider implications
that can be drawn from this identification in understanding the nature
of language and grammar. Specifically, I try to widen the implications
of my argument against identification of language change and language
evolution within the debate on the nature of protolanguage. I argue
that once we admit the difficulties of this identification, we can use
them as a magnifying glass to discuss about protolanguage.
Cheers,
Simon
*** NOTE: UNUSUAL VENUE ***
This week’s LEC talk will be from our brand-new PhD student, Alan Nielsen. He’ll be talking about his previous work on evaluating sound-symbolism (particularly the takete-maluma or bouba-kiki phenomenon, where certain non-words are said to universally match to particular novel shapes).
Time: Tuesday 25th October, 11.00 – 12.30
Place: DHT ground-floor conference room
*** NOTE: UNUSUAL VENUE ***
We’ve got a real treat for you tomorrow. In our usual slot, we have our academic visitor Andy Wedel, and then another talk in the afternoon from the MSc external examiner, Bart de Boer!
11:00 – 12:30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building: Andy Wedel
14:00 – 15:00, S37 7 George Square: Bart de Boer.
Andy’s talk title and abstract are below.
Hope to see you all for both of these events!
Simon
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We have a visiting speaker who, at the last minute, is able to give us a talk which is likely to be interesting to LEC people. It will be tomorrow (Friday) from 2.00-3.00 in Appleton Tower room 2.05.
Language viewed from Mars:A statistical universal of human languages and their psychological implications
I introduce a new tool for the macroscopic description of human language. A language, as represented by a corpus of text, can be described by its symbolic periodogram. This is an objective tool, analogous to the spectrograms commonly used for speech analysis. I will show that, across many languages, periodograms reveal a strikingly universal ‘shape’. Overall, the pattern consists of a tendency to avoid repetition of structures in the very short time scales, a tendency for repetitions at the very long scales, and a neutral regime in between those two. I will discuss how such statistical universal relates to a large number of phenomena that have been described in psycholinguistic research. Despite the universality of the general pattern, subtle differences also reveal particularities of individual languages. These differences demonstrate a long-held –but unproven– hypothesis: As the syntactic structure in a language becomes less complex, its morphological structure becomes more complex, as would be predicted if total amount of linguistic structure remains fairly constant across languages.
References:
Moscoso del Prado, F. (in press) The universal `shape’ of human languages: spectral analysis beyond speech. PLoS One.
[preprint available from http://www.moscosodelprado.net/docs/fourier-plos.pdf]
Kenny Smith has been chosen amongst the first members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland. The RSE said: “A rigorous selection procedure resulted in 68 young academics, entrepreneurs and professionals being chosen to be the first members in Scotland. The Young Academy will be launched at a ceremony in Edinburgh in November. Members were selected from over 300 applicants.”
Well done Kenny!
The next LEC talk will be given by Bill Thompson on “Evolutionary Arguments Against Linguistic Nativism“. It will be on Tuesday 4th October, 11.00-12.30, Room 1.17 DSB.
Hope to see you all there!
Simon
Our first LEC meeting of the new academic year is next Tuesday in DSB 1.17 at 11.00-12.30. Sean will be giving us a talk about his current PhD topic.
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“The implications of Bilingualism for Language Evolution”
Children are good at learning multiple languages simultaneously. However, learning an extra language leaves the speaker potentially no more expressive at a cost of an increase in the amount of learning required. How can we account for the evolution of this bilingual ability? Would early populations of language users most likely be monolingual or bilingual? I look at how bottom-up and top-down approaches lead to different answers to these questions.
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New students on the ELC MSc are most welcome to come along if they wish. We’re really quite friendly.
Cheers,
Simon
Next week, Keelin will be giving a dry run of her talk of the Protolang conference, summarising the results from her recent experiments on correlations between rhythmic learning and fitness. The title is:
“Musical protolanguage put to the test”
Keelin Murray
DSB 1.17, Tuesday 30th August, 11:00
See you all there!
Simon
Two talks from two Simons next Tuesday at the LEC!
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“Linguistic structure is the adaptive compromise between communication and learning: new evidence from simulation and experiments”
Simon Kirby, 11.00-12.30, 1.17 DSB
This will be a summary a bunch of new computational and experimental results that touch on issues such as the role of horizontal vs. vertical transmission, and whether some of the basic design features of language are actually more basic than others. This is work carried out with Monica Tamariz, Hannah Cornish, Sean Roberts and Kenny Smith.
—-
“Pattern and Computation in an Animal Social System”
Simon DeDeo, 14.00-15.00, 1.17 DSB
Simon is a postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute, and is visiting us briefly. He works with David Krakauer, and is interested in the empirical analysis of behaviour in model animal systems, as well as mathematical formalisms for describing regularities in the behaviour (in particular, group-theoretic tools for the analysis of finite-state machines).
Simon is keen to learn more about our work here, so I hope that PhD students and postdocs (and anyone else interested) will have time to meet him in the afternoon after his talk.
Here’s his web page: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~simon/
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See you all there!
Simon