Language Is a Complex Adaptive System: Position Paper

Beckner, Clay; Blythe, Richard A.; Bybee, Joan; Christiansen, Morten H.; Croft, William; Ellis, Nick C.; Holland, John H.; Jin, Ke; Larsen‐Freeman, Diane; Schoenemann, Tom

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00533.x

Cited by 655 publications

(246 citation statements)

References 105 publications

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“…Previous work has suggested that aspects of language appear to be adapted to ecological or social niches (56). For example, linguistic diversity is correlated with biodiversity (57) and pathogen prevalence (58), and morphological complexity is related to population size (59).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots

Everett

Blasí

Roberts

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

147

110

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We summarize a number of findings in laryngology demonstrating that perturbations of phonation, including increased jitter and shimmer, are associated with desiccated ambient air. We predict that, given the relative imprecision of vocal fold vibration in desiccated versus humid contexts, arid and cold ecologies should be less amenable, when contrasted to warm and humid ecologies, to the development of languages with phonemic tone, especially complex tone. This prediction is supported by data from two large independently coded databases representing 3,700+ languages. Languages with complex tonality have generally not developed in very cold or otherwise desiccated climates, in accordance with the physiologically based predictions. The predicted global geographic-linguistic association is shown to operate within continents, within major language families, and across language isolates. Our results offer evidence that human sound systems are influenced by environmental factors.climate | language | adaptation | tone A standard assumption in linguistics is that sound systems are immune to ecological effects (1). This presumption has been called into question by several recent studies providing evidence for a correlation between aspects of phonology (such as sonority) and climatic and geographic factors (such as temperature, plant cover, or terrain), as well as behaviors associated with such factors (2-9). Most recently, a correlation was uncovered between ejective sounds and regions of high elevation in a sample of nearly 600 languages (10). Although two plausible physiological motivations are offered in ref. 10 for the correlation between ejective use and reduced ambient air pressure, those explanations have yet to be supported by experimental evidence. The uncovered patterns could be epiphenomenal, and in general, the cross-linguistic statistical studies in question have not been buttressed by experimental support (11).In this study, we offer evidence for a negative correlation between linguistic tone and characteristic rates of desiccation in ambient air. In contradistinction to the aforementioned studies offering geographic/phonetic correlations, however, we suggest this correlation is predicted by extensive experimental research on the properties of the human larynx. This research, which has been conducted by numerous laryngologists over the last decade and a half, has not been previously tied to the distribution of the world's tonal languages. We submit that the research predicts that the relatively precise manipulation of the vocal folds associated with tone, especially complex tone, should be more difficult to achieve in arid climates-particularly very cold ones-when contrasted to warmer and more humid climates. We offer global, continental, and intralinguistic-family data consistent with the expected geographic/tonemic association. Our results cannot facilely be ascribed to well-known phylogenetic and areal relatedness. We conclude by suggesting that the most reasonable interpretation of the data is that the a...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots

Everett

Blasí

Roberts

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

147

110

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“…Through a usage-based approach, we can begin to understand the nature of phonology as emergent and dynamic (Beckner et al 2009;Elman 1995;Thelen & Smith 1996). What Embodied Cognitive Phonology adds to well-established frameworks is the inclusion of phonemes in the same echelon as other symbolic units, schematized from usage-events.…”

Section: An Embodied Cognitive Phonologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Language comprehenders represent object distance both visually and auditorily

Winter

Bergen

2012

Lang Cognition

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Abstract. While the arbitrariness of the sign has occupied a central space in linguistic theory for a century, counter-evidence to this basic tenet has been mounting. Recent findings from cross-linguistic studies on spoken languages have suggested that, contrary to purely arbitrary distributions of phonological content, languages often exhibit systematic and regular phonological and sub-phonological patterns of form-meaning mappings. To date, studies of distributional tendencies of this kind have not been conducted for signed languages.In an investigation of phoneme distribution in American Sign Language (ASL) and Língua Brasileira de Sinais (Libras), tokens of the claw-5 handshape were extracted and analyzed for whether the handshape contributed to the overall meaning of the sign. The data suggests that distribution of the claw-5 handshape is not randomly distributed across the lexicon, but clusters around six formmeaning patterns: convex-concave, Unitary-elements, non-compact matter, hand-as-hand, touch, and interlocking. Interestingly, feature-level motivations were uncovered as the source of the mappings These findings are considered within a new cognitive framework to better understand how and why sub-morphemic units develop and maintain motivated form-meaning mappings. The model proposed here, Embodied Cognitive Phonology, builds on cognitive and usage-based approaches but incorporates theories of embodiment to address the source of the claw-5 mappings. Embodied Cognitive Phonology provides a unifying framework for understanding the perceived differences in phonological patterning and organization across the modalities. Both language-internal and languageexternal sources of motivation contribute to the emergence of form-meaning mappings. Arbitrariness is argued to be but one possible outcome from the process of emergence and schematization of phonological content, and exists alongside motivation as a legitimate state of linguistic units of all sizes of complexity. Importantly, because language is dynamic, these states are not fixed, but are in continuous flux, as language users reinvent and reinterpret form and meaning over time.

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“…Language appears as a complex information channel (Shannon, 1948), continuously evolving to facilitate communication (more about its complex adaptive nature in Beckner et al, 2009;Ramscar, 2010;Ramsar & Baayen, 2013). Moreover, it unfolds on many levels of granularity, from orthographic and phonological elements, over words and word chunks to sentences and beyond.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A learning perspective on individual differences in skilled reading: Exploring and exploiting orthographic and semantic discrimination cues.

Milin

Divjak

Baayen

2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The goal of the present study is to understand the role orthographic and semantic information play in the behaviour of skilled readers. Reading latencies from a self-paced sentence reading experiment in which Russian near-synonymous verbs were manipulated appear well-predicted by a combination of bottom-up sub-lexical letter triplets (trigraphs) and top-down semantic generalizations, modelled using the Naive Discrimination Learner. The results reveal a complex interplay of bottom-up and top-down support from orthography and semantics to the target verbs, whereby activations from orthography only are modulated by individual differences. Using performance on a serial reaction time task for a novel operationalization of the mental speed hypothesis, we explain the observed individual differences in reading behaviour in terms of the exploration/exploitation hypothesis from Reinforcement Learning, where initially slower and more variable behaviour leads to better performance overall.

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Language Is a Complex Adaptive System: Position Paper

Cited by 655 publications

References 105 publications

Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots

Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots

Language comprehenders represent object distance both visually and auditorily

A learning perspective on individual differences in skilled reading: Exploring and exploiting orthographic and semantic discrimination cues.

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