Language follows a distinct mode of extra-genomic evolution

B Bickel, AL Giraud, K Zuberbühler, CP Van Schaik - Physics of life reviews, 2024 - Elsevier
As one of the most specific, yet most diverse of human behaviors, language is shaped by
both genomic and extra-genomic evolution. Sharing methods and models between these …

Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms: Evidence from positional splits

B Herce, C Saldana, J Mansfield, B Bickel - Glossa, 2023 - zora.uzh.ch
Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same
position (eg, all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as …

[PDF][PDF] Positional splits in person-number agreement paradigms reflect a naturalness gradient: Typological and experimental evidence

B Herce, C Saldana, J Mansfield, B Bickel - 2022 - files.osf.io
Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same
position (eg, all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as …

The emergence of grammatical structure from inter-predictability

J Mansfield, C Kemp - 2023 - osf.io
Recent research has shown that words or morphemes that are closer to each other in linear
order tend to have higher statistical inter-predictability, measured as mutual information. We …

Exploring horizontal homophony in pronominal paradigms: A case study where cross-linguistic regularities defy individual learning biases

C Saldana, M Maldonado - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of …, 2024 - escholarship.org
Homophony (ie, multiple meanings expressed by the same form) is ubiquitous across the
world's languages. Despite its pervasiveness, not all instances of homophony are equally …

Speakers' cognitive representations of gender and number morphology shape cross-linguistic tendencies in morpheme order

C Saldana, J Culbertson - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of …, 2023 - escholarship.org
Languages exhibit a tremendous amount of variation in how they organise and order
morphemes within words; however, regularities are also found. For example, gender and …

Preferences in Miniature Language Learning as Evidence of Biases in Language Use

LJ Kim - 2023 - search.proquest.com
Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language
universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other …

From cognition to word order universals: an artificial language learning approach

F Wang - 2024 - era.ed.ac.uk
Despite their striking diversity, human languages exhibit many statistical universals.
Explanations for the origin of statistical universals include language relatedness, innate …

[PDF][PDF] Gender comes first: Experimental evidence for the representation of gender closer to the noun stem than number across linguistic populations

C Saldana, P Kanampiu, J Culbertson - osf.io
Languages exhibit a tremendous amount of variation in how they organise and order
morphemes within words; however, regularities are also found. For example, gender and …

[PDF][PDF] Entropy reduction in language change and language acquisition

S Stoll, M Loporcaro, J Mažara, B Bickel - acqdiv.uzh.ch
Languages are subject to relentless change over time. This dynamic is one of the most
specific features of human language compared to other communication systems across …