Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #Protolang7
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In yet another talk @kristian_tylen presents work with and @cordulavesper on the cultural route to the conceptualisation of space #Protolang7
Concepts have traditionally been thought of as either transcendental, biological, or grounded in social interaction. The latter refers for instance, how languages make conceptual distinctions, e.g. with regard to spatial relations 
What drives these distinctions? It might be that salient features of the environment drive these distinctions in situated language use where environmental biases would get enhanced and eventually conventionalized in culture
Cool work on complexity and simplicity in language evolution across species by @Limor_Raviv and @cedricboeckx. They start with an interesting discrepancy between animals and humans in how social complexity shapes the complexity of their communication systems #Protolang7
An important distinction we need to make is whether we are talking about grammar or simple signal variation, and what 'simple' or 'complex' actually refers too. The mirror pattern we see might relate directly to how we distinguish these concepts.
In animal communication research, the social complexity hypothesis contrasts on the surface quite directly with the linguistic nich hypothesis by @glupyan et al, suggesting a seemingly disciplinary conflict
@YaaminMoot et al from @UoE_CLE show work on regularisation, naturalness, and systematicity in silent gesture experiments. They start with the question of we get from item-based preling communication to a system via several processes #Protolang7
One way to test this is using possible biases in word order. E.g. naturalness: specific orders preferred for specific meanings, or regularity: same WO used for a specific meaning, or systematicity: same WO across all meanings. We also know that WO can be conditioned on semantics
this is strong natural preference found in silent gestures. But what about spoken languages? It seems much less natural there, but there is some evidence for sign languages (NSL). So is naturalness limited to improvisation? Is it replaced by systematic structure through learning?
Greg Mills asks how people coordinate when they interact with each other.
#Protolang7
#Protolang7
Usually we use reference games to study how conventions emerge to enable this. Which usually leads to patterns and the emergence of conventions lik enew referring expressions (or signs in experimental semiotics)
BUT there are more fundamental coordination problems in dialogue that are actually very different from referential problems. He shows clips of people coordinating on a street quite seemlessly and messed up high fives or tennis doubles, where coordination fails.
Magdalena Schwarz, @thematzing & Niki Ritt ask why do we trust others? Between kin it makes sense, but what how is trust maintained in non-kin within cooperative groups? Or even with strangers?
#Protolang7
#Protolang7
Hypotheses on this involve social bonds, reputatio, gossip and 3rd party punishment that all help maintain trust. But what about strangers?
For strangers, symbolic tags can help identify whether they are trustworthy (e.g., wearing same clothes as ones own group). But free-riders could easily imitate this tag. Speech, or more specifically accent might be a more reliabl marker that is very hard to fake (Cohen 2012)
Cool talk by @greg_woodin (w/ @MarcusPerlman @BodoWinter) colleagues on the connections between metaphor, gesture, iconicity & mental sensorimotor simulations #Protolang
Iconicity, e.g. in the form of sound symbolism is pervasive in the lexicon. Iconicity can also help ground symbols via sensorimotor simulation (e.g., representing what it means for something to be a 'tree'). We also find interactions of word processing with specific brain areas
How can sensorimotor simulation manifest in iconic expressions? Looking at gestures suggests that when we think about actions, premotor activation can spill over into iconic signals as well as more deliberately when there is a need/goal to communicate perceptual details
Do languages spoken by larger communities rely more on sound-symbolism? (e.g. high front vowels ~ small, back low vowels ~ large) @shirilevari et al address this Q
at #Protolang7
at #Protolang7
Larger communities have more comm problems to overcome, so if sound symbolism makes lang easier to learn and process, this should be the case. They therefore looked at words for big/small in common and less common languages and synthesized
A nice interactive component in the talk showed that participants of the conference intuitively responded to the sound symbolism replicating experimental results, where it seems to be easier to predict meaning in more widely spoken languages.
Multimodality is the future of language! Plenary by @ozyurek_a on how multimodality should shape our ideas of language (and thus its evolution) at #Protolang7
Earlier approaches into the fundamental nature of language have ignored multimodal aspects. Ozyurek, however, argues that language is an adaptive system that has been multimodal from the get-go and adapting to any setting it is thrown into (including future technologies)
Multimodal expressivity as a fundamental design feature is what has allowed language to be so adaptive, as each modality provides individual semiotic affordances that can be applied (and combined) in all kinds of communicative contexts.
@MichelDeGraff from @MITHaiti challenging prejudice about creole languages in his plenary at #Protolang7
Lang evo literature itself says we shouldn't mix up ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence, and YET it appears often as a given to use pidgins and creoles as windows into the past. They are often treated similar to emerging sign languages. However, the conditions are not the same.
See this paper by DeGraff arguing against Creole Exceptionalism (that is still widely held in linguistics) for more details: cambridge.org/core/journals/…
