Modeling the emergence of contact languages

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena

Pleistocene Exchange Networks as Evidence for the Evolution of Language

Distances of raw-material transportation reflect how hominid groups gather and exchange information. Early hominids moved raw materials short distances, suggesting a home range size, social complexity and communication system similar to primates in equivalent environments. After about 1.0 million years ago there was a large increase in raw-material transfer distances, possibly a result of the emergence of the ability to pool information by using a protolanguage. Another increase in raw-material transfer occurred during the late Middle Stone Age in Africa (after about 130,000 years ago), suggesting the operation of exchange networks. Exchange networks require a communication system with syntax, the use of symbols in social contexts and the ability to express displacement, which are the features of human language. Taking the Neanderthals as a case study, biological evidence and the results of computer simulations of the evolution of language, I argue for a gradual rather than catastrophic emergence of language coinciding with the first evidence of exchange networks

lnformation and Communication Technology (lCT) Applications in English Language Teaching (ELT): Prospects and Challenges

Abstract: The onset of information and communication technology (lCT) has influenced education sector, especially English language teaching and learning. Many researches have proved that the use of information and communication technology (ICT) have positively impacted on language teaching and learning in many aspects, such as motivation, interest, attitude, confidence, and competence. The emergence of various and easy-use ICT facilities and applications promises and brings about potentiality on the innovation of eaching and learning of English as a second/foreign language. Therefore, the integration of ICT in language leaming has become indispensable in today's teaching Iearning environment. This paper highlights some prospects of ICT applications in improving the quality of EFL teaching and learning. Some of the challenges facing the use of ICT in language learning, such as computer and internet facililies, teachers' skills and commitment, and government support, are also disqussed

An open standard for the exchange of information in the Australian timber sector

The purpose of this paper is to describe business-to-business (B2B) communication and the characteristics of an open standard for electronic communication within the Australian timber and wood products industry. Current issues, future goals and strategies for using business-to-business communication will be considered. From the perspective of the Timber industry sector, this study is important because supply chain efficiency is a key component in an organisation's strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strong improvement in supply chain performance is possible with improved business-to-business communication which is used both for building trust and providing real time marketing data. Traditional methods such as electronic data interchange (EDI) used to facilitate B2B communication have a number of disadvantages, such as high implementation and running costs and a rigid and inflexible messaging standard. Information and communications technologies (ICT) have supported the emergence of web-based EDI which maintains the advantages of the traditional paradigm while negating the disadvantages. This has been further extended by the advent of the Semantic web which rests on the fundamental idea that web resources should be annotated with semantic markup that captures information about their meaning and facilitates meaningful machine-to-machine communication. This paper provides an ontology using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for the Australian Timber sector that can be used in conjunction with semantic web services to provide effective and cheap B2B communications

ASSESSING LANGUAGE QUALITY IN THE INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT PROCESS – A THEORETICAL APPROACH AND ITS APPLICATION

The necessary knowledge transfer and communication between project members is identified as a relevant issue in information systems development (ISD). Nevertheless, the impact of linguistic communication on ISD and requirements specification in its processual nature is still an open issue. In our research, we claim that effectiveness of ISD depends on the ability to manage how people deal with language in practice and reach a shared understanding. We propose the concept of language quality as a suitable means for analyzing the emergence of concise and meaningful requirements in ISD. By applying the thereby developed language quality dimensions on a real project, we were able to obtain practice-grounded propositions for practitioners to consider and for researchers to further evaluate the consequences of different actions on the interaction and communication processes for this particular field

Statistical physics of language dynamics

Language dynamics is a rapidly growing field that focuses on all processes related to the emergence, evolution, change and extinction of languages. Recently, the study of self-organization and evolution of language and meaning has led to the idea that a community of language users can be seen as a complex dynamical system, which collectively solves the problem of developing a shared communication framework through the back-and-forth signaling between individuals. We shall review some of the progress made in the past few years and highlight potential future directions of research in this area. In particular, the emergence of a common lexicon and of a shared set of linguistic categories will be discussed, as examples corresponding to the early stages of a language. The extent to which synthetic modeling is nowadays contributing to the ongoing debate in cognitive science will be pointed out. In addition, the burst of growth of the web is providing new experimental frameworks. It makes available a huge amount of resources, both as novel tools and data to be analyzed, allowing quantitative and large-scale analysis of the processes underlying the emergence of a collective information and language dynamics

Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

The interpersonal origins of language: Social and linguistic implications of an archaeological approach to language evolution

The development of the interpersonal functions of language is a key step in language ontogeny. Archaeological evidence of hominids moving raw materials across the landscape suggest that changes in the interpersonal communication abilities of hominids represent major events in human language evolution. The earliest hominids moved raw materials short distances, suggesting home-range sizes, social complexity and interpersonal abilities similar to those of primates. A transition from primate communication to a protolanguage is indicated by a large increase in raw-material transfer distances at about 1.2 million years ago. The increase in transfer distances results from the ability to pool social and environmental information using a protolanguage. The transition to human language is suggested by the emergence of long-distance exchange networks during the African Middle Stone Age. The operation of exchange networks requires the full panoply of human interpersonal communication abilities, such as the use of symbols in social contexts, expression of displacement, the expression of multiple degrees of intentionality and recursiveness. The results of computer simulations show that this transition from protolanguage to full language may have resulted from language adapting itself rather than any specific biological or cultural mutation