Minds, Mechanisms and Interaction in the Evolution of Language

Plenary speakers

• David Leavens, University of Sussex
• Jennie Pyers, Wellesley College
• Monica Tamariz, Heriot Watt University

The workshop also includes presentations from the Levinson group (Language Evolution and Interaction Scholars of Nijmegen)  and an introduction by Stephen Levinson himself! The full programme can be downloaded here. 

A poster session will take place on the evening of Thursday September 21st 2017. A full list of accepted posters can be downloaded here.

Registration is now closed.

Summer school

The workshop will also be bookended with a summer school on 20th and 23rd September specifically aimed at PhD students. The school will consist of a short tutorial series covering experimental and statistical methods that should be of broad interest to a general audience, though focussed around the theme of the workshop. In this tutorial series, we will cover all aspects of creating, hosting, and analysing the data from a set of experiments that will be run live (online) during the workshop! More details for how to register to the summer school and workshop will follow.

Poster Information

Posters can be displayed in either landscape or portrait format and they should be on A0 paper size, which is 841 x 1189 mm (33.1 x 46.8 inches). Unfortunately we cannot offer onsite printing. 

Where and when:

Sep 21-22, 2017

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Organizers:

Levinson Group

Scientific committee:

Piera Filippi

Hannah Little

Ashley Micklos

Yasamin Motamedi

Alan Nielsen

Marcus Perlman

Andrea Ravignani

Kevin Stadler

Justin Sulik

Bill Thompson

Contact:

Hannah Little, Hannah.Little [at] mpi.nl (Hannah[dot]Little[at]mpi[dot]nl)

Program & Abstracts

Thursday, September 21st

 

9:00-9:30Introduction by Stephen Levinson

9:30-10:30

Plenary Talk: David Leavens

The Referential Problem Space: Ecological Determinants of Nonverbal Reference

Nonverbal reference is the ability to pick out a common focus of attention between two or more interactants.  For decades, cognitive scientists took the view that this capability was the product of evolutionary selection, unique to the human lineage among primates, and a developmental precursor to verbal reference.  Pointing is the quintessential example of nonverbal reference.  Despite sporadic reports of pointing by great apes dating back more than a century, pointing has been interpreted as a developmental index of a maturing, innate capacity for the meeting of minds in our species.  With the many demonstrations of pointing by great apes in experimentally controlled conditions, it is now unambiguously clear that apes in captivity do frequently point, without any explicit training, and despite not having a selective history for linguistic communication.  Yet reports of pointing by wild apes are vanishingly rare.  Thus, among humans’ nearest living relatives, pointing emerges in some ecological contexts, but not in others, demonstrating its sensitivity to environmental input.  Recently, some have argued that some kinds of pointing, but not others, implicate mental state awareness in humans as young as 12 months of age.  I will critique this perspective on methodological and logical grounds.  In my view, while pointing reveals a great deal about researchers’ biases and theoretical commitments, it is mute as to its psychological underpinnings.  Finally, I will discuss the ramifications of ape pointing as a pre-adaptation for human language.

10:30-11:00Coffee Break

11:00-11:30

Piera Filippi

Biological universals in voice modulation across terrestrial vertebrates: a comparative approach to the study of language evolution

A central aspect of animal vocal communication is the ability to recognize emotional state or body size of signalers based on the perception of the signaler’s tone of voice. I will report on recent empirical data on humans, suggesting that prosodic modulation of the voice is evolutionarily older than the emergence of segmental articulation and might have paved the way to its origins. Within this framework, I will emphasize the key role of the interactional value of voice modulation in relation to the evolution and ontogenetic development of language. Finally, implications for the study of the cognitive relationship between linguistic prosody and the ability for music, which has often been identified as the evolutionary precursor of language, will be discussed

11:30-12:00

 

 Marcus Perlman

Laryngeal air sacs, silverback chest beating displays, and the evolution of speech

The great apes – but not humans – all possess laryngeal air sacs, indicating that these were lost sometime over hominin evolution. Understanding why human ancestors lost their air sacs may provide clues to the evolution of speech. However, little is known about their function in extant great apes. In this talk, I explore the hypothesis that gorillas use their laryngeal air sacs to produce the staccato ‘growling’ sound of the male chest beating display, as well as other similar sounding ‘whinny’ vocalizations. These vocalizations are predominantly, but not exclusively, produced by males. I propose that great apes use their air sacs for vocalizations and displays related to size exaggeration for sex and territory. Thus, changes in social structure, mating, and sexual dimorphism, rather than evolutionary pressures directly related to the advent of speech, may have led to the obsolescence of the air sacs and their loss in hominin evolution.

 

12:00-13:00Lunch

 

 

13:00-13:30

Andrea Ravignani

The evolution of musical rhythm between biology and culture

Musical rhythm, beyond its variety, exhibits cross-cultural similarities and statistical universals. Testing the mechanisms underlying these universals, I will show human experiments where musical rhythm is created and evolves culturally due to cognitive and motoric biases. I will also suggest how comparative animal experiments can help reconstruct early hominid musicality.

 

13:30-14:00

 

Bill Thompson

Cross-linguistic Biases in Lexical Semantics

Words carve up human experience into richly structured categories of events, objects, relationships, emotions, and ideas. Categories like these subserve human communication and interaction, but it has long been unclear how similar these categories are for speakers of different languages. Recent progress in applied machine learning and artificial intelligence has resulted in large scale machine-readable semantic networks across many languages. I’ll present an analysis of typological patterns in lexical semantics, focusing on semantic domains that are most and least divergent across a sample of 28 languages. More generally, I'll discuss how emerging methods at the intersection of machine learning and psycholinguistics can illuminate the generative process for vocabularies, and the transmission of knowledge via language. 

14:00-15:00

 Plenary Talk: Monica Tamariz

Biased and unbiased transmission in language evolution

 

An overarching goal of evolutionary studies is to explain the patterns of diversity observed in a system such as life or culture. As a cultural behaviour, language is embedded in three evolutionary systems: genetic, social and ecological (Laland et al. 2000). Focusing on the social level, I will give a view of how cultural evolutionary theory explains the extraordinary stability and variation of language. I separate two components of transmission that are often conflated in the literature. First, unbiased, high-fidelity transmission (inheritance) mechanisms such as imitation, overimitation (Whiten et al. 2016) and pedagogy (Kline 2015) achieve continuity, which is manifested in long lineages of linguistic elements, such as words and speech sounds (e.g. Pagel 2009). Second, biased transmission (selection) mechanisms that can be classed as guided variation, or content-, model- and frequency-based biases (Richerson & Boyd 2005) result in the patterns of diversity observed in world languages. In the second part of the talk I will look at the contribution of each of those two processes in iterated learning experiments and their results --compressible, expressive systems-- to chart what we know about the cultural transmission of language and to identify questions that still need to be addressed.

 

15:00-15:30Coffee Break

15:30-16:00

Marieke Woensdregt

A model of cultural co-evolution of language and perspective-taking

It has often been proposed that language and theory of mind have co-evolved. Here I will present an agent-based model which aims to formalise this hypothesis, focusing specifically on the affordances of cultural evolution (using the iterated learning model). We focus on perspective-taking as a subset of theory of mind abilities, and assume that communicative behaviour results from an interaction between an agent's internal perspective and language with the external context. Language-learning thus requires inferring both language and perspective of a speaker.

Simulation results show that learners can solve this task by bootstrapping one from the other, but only if the speaker uses a language that is at least somewhat informative. Simulations of iterated learning in populations show that a selection pressure for evolving successful communication gives rise to successful perspective-inference for free, and vice versa; in both cases by virtue of the population establishing an informative language from scratch.

16:00-16:30

Alan Nielsen

Modelling the typological realisation of cognitive biases

Humans are not unbiased learners: features of their perceptuocognitive organisation produce an inclination to prefer certain associations. For example, most people associate high pitched sounds with small, bright, or spiky objects. How do biases like these shape the words of a language? Recent typological evidence has established numerous cross-linguistic regularities (Blasi et al., 2016): for example, words meaning ‘nose’ contain a higher-than-expected proportion of nasal sounds, and individuals have shown to be biased towards this type of mapping. Nonetheless, only one third of the languages surveyed have nasals in their words for nose – why is this the case? Why isn’t the alignment between bias and language structure perfect? Here we present computational simulations of this dynamic in populations of pervasively biased Bayesian learners transmitting a vocabulary culturally. These simulations allow us to explore the implications for making inferences from typology to cognition, and vice versa.   We show that the transmission of cultural traits among learners with multiple, potentially overlapping, biases leads to locally optimal solutions where languages differ: despite their agents sharing biases, no individual language can satisfy all biases at a given time.

 

16:30-17:00

Hannah Little

Biases born from modality affect the emergence of linguistic structure

What did structure in language originally look like?  In this talk, I consider how linguistic modality (speech or sign) affects the emergence of structure in language. I argue, with evidence from experimental studies, that modality affects whether combinatorial (phonological) or compositional (syntactic) structure emerged first. If a modality allows for many thousands of holistic signals (as is possible using the manual modality), then a system is likely to adopt compositional structure first, as in emerging signed languages. If, on the other hand, a modality is a lot more restrictive in the number of distinct signals it can produce, then combinatorial structure will become necessary a lot more quickly to aid discrimination. I will briefly link this to the abilities of animals and structure in animal communication systems. The flexibility of the modality the animals (or humans) are using to communicate must be considered before attributing structure to cognitive abilities.

 

17:00-17:30

Yasamin Motamedi

The cultural evolution of space: evidence from artificial sign language learning 

Sign languages, like spoken languages, use a range of linguistic tools to disambiguate arguments across discourse. Some of these tools, such as lexical contrasts and word order, are shared with spoken languages, but other tools are thought to be modality-specific. In particular, sign language users are able to exploit the space around them to contrast clause arguments in a visual representation of the grammatical relationship. Such spatial modulations are prevalent across sign languages (Mathur and Rathmann, 2012), to the extent that they have been considered an inevitability of the manual modality.

However, data from emerging sign languages (Padden et al., 2010; Meir et al., 2007; de Vos, 2012), suggest that the use of systematic spatial contrasts is not always present in the early generations of a sign language. Furthermore, recent study of a developed sign language, British Sign Language, has shown that signers rely more heavily on iconic spatial mappings than previously thought (Cormier et al., 2015).

In this talk, I present an experiment that investigates the emergence and evolution of spatial strategies in novel manual communication systems, motivated by data from naturally emerging sign languages. I combine a number of existing paradigms to provide an evolutionary model of sign language emergence, that tests the effects of interaction between language users and transmission of language to new users on the emergence of language structure. The experiment presented in this task investigates whether the use of space is an inevitable consequence of the manual-visual modality, and how the iconic affordances of the manual modality, and, in particular, of the gesturer’s body, effect the evolution of spatial modulations.

17:30-18:30

Borrel/Speaker Dinner

18:30-19:30

Poster Session (Poster programme here)

Travel & Accommodation

Travel to Nijmegen and the MPI

Nijmegen is best reached via train. Trains from Amsterdam Central and Amsterdam Schiphol Airport run every 15-30 minutes, and take approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes. A one-way ticket costs just under 20 euro and can be purchased at ticket machines located in the station.

Once in Nijmegen there are many bus services that can bring you to the MPI:

From the Centre: 6 (toward Dukenburg), 13 & 15 (toward Wijchen)

From the Centraal Station: 6 (toward Dukenburg), 13 & 15 (toward Wijchen), 10 (Heyendaal Station-Centraal Station link)

On the 6, disembark at Van Peltlaan and walk east

All other services, disembark at Spinozaegebouw and walk south

Buses accept cash on board (1,50 for a one-way journey).

There are a number of bike rentals available in the city as well. The OV bike rental at the train station is likely the  most expensive option, but all quite convenient. Biking from the center takes approximately 15-20 minutes.

Heading in on foot is another option! From the center, the walk to the MPI along Sint Annastraat or Heyendaalseweg will take about 45 minutes (it is quite flat though!).

Accommodation in Nijmegen

There are a number of hotel options in the city center. The Mercure Hotel is located next to the Nijmegen Central Station as well. Please keep in mind some hotels do not offer 24-hour check-in.

There are AirBnB hosts throughout the city. For September, the average cost per night is 55 euro. We recommend checking travel distances to the MPI before booking.

Please note that the MPI Guest House is not available for booking.

Lunch Options Nearby

Unfortunately, while we will offer coffee/tea breaks and borrel snacks for all attendees, we cannot provide lunch for all. However, there are plenty of options on the Radboud University campus for dining, here are some options:

MPI Canteen (MPI Building): Recently renovated and serving sandwiches, soups, and salads. Open until 2pm. Cash and card are accepted.

Restaurant Het Gerecht (Montessorilaan 10): Located in the Faculty of Law across from the MPI. They offer hot dishes, soups, salads, sandwiches, and snacks until 3pm. Cash is not accepted here, only card (debit).

Restaurant De Refter (Erasmusplein 3): The university restaurant located in the center of campus (near Cultuurcafe). Hot dishes and snacks are available for lunch until 1:30pm on Thursday, and 2pm on Friday.

Dinner Options Nearby

There are many restaurants and cafes in the centre. We are happy to give you our recommendations, just ask!