Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns

The empirical evidence that human color categorization exhibits some universal patterns beyond superficial discrepancies across different cultures is a major breakthrough in cognitive science. As observed in the World Color Survey (WCS), indeed, any two groups of individuals develop quite different categorization patterns, but some universal properties can be identified by a statistical analysis over a large number of populations. Here, we reproduce the WCS in a numerical model in which different populations develop independently their own categorization systems by playing elementary language games. We find that a simple perceptual constraint shared by all humans, namely the human Just Noticeable Difference (JND), is sufficient to trigger the emergence of universal patterns that unconstrained cultural interaction fails to produce. We test the results of our experiment against real data by performing the same statistical analysis proposed to quantify the universal tendencies shown in the WCS [Kay P and Regier T. (2003) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100: 9085-9089], and obtain an excellent quantitative agreement. This work confirms that synthetic modeling has nowadays reached the maturity to contribute significantly to the ongoing debate in cognitive science.Comment: Supplementery Information available here http://www.pnas.org/content/107/6/2403/suppl/DCSupplementa

A Deep Generative Model of Vowel Formant Typology

What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and, thereby, divine the mechanisms that underlie human language. In our work, we tackle the problem of vowel system typology, i.e., we propose a generative probability model of which vowels a language contains. In contrast to previous work, we work directly with the acoustic information -- the first two formant values -- rather than modeling discrete sets of phonemic symbols (IPA). We develop a novel generative probability model and report results based on a corpus of 233 languages.Comment: NAACL 201

A fast no-rejection algorithm for the Category Game

The Category Game is a multi-agent model that accounts for the emergence of shared categorization patterns in a population of interacting individuals. In the framework of the model, linguistic categories appear as long lived consensus states that are constantly reshaped and re-negotiated by the communicating individuals. It is therefore crucial to investigate the long time behavior to gain a clear understanding of the dynamics. However, it turns out that the evolution of the emerging category system is so slow, already for small populations, that such an analysis has remained so far impossible. Here, we introduce a fast no-rejection algorithm for the Category Game that disentangles the physical simulation time from the CPU time, thus opening the way for thorough analysis of the model. We verify that the new algorithm is equivalent to the old one in terms of the emerging phenomenology and we quantify the CPU performances of the two algorithms, pointing out the neat advantages offered by the no-rejection one. This technical advance has already opened the way to new investigations of the model, thus helping to shed light on the fundamental issue of categorization.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Paradoxical Interpretations of Urban Scaling Laws

Scaling laws are powerful summaries of the variations of urban attributes with city size. However, the validity of their universal meaning for cities is hampered by the observation that different scaling regimes can be encountered for the same territory, time and attribute, depending on the criteria used to delineate cities. The aim of this paper is to present new insights concerning this variation, coupled with a sensitivity analysis of urban scaling in France, for several socio-economic and infrastructural attributes from data collected exhaustively at the local level. The sensitivity analysis considers different aggregations of local units for which data are given by the Population Census. We produce a large variety of definitions of cities (approximatively 5000) by aggregating local Census units corresponding to the systematic combination of three definitional criteria: density, commuting flows and population cutoffs. We then measure the magnitude of scaling estimations and their sensitivity to city definitions for several urban indicators, showing for example that simple population cutoffs impact dramatically on the results obtained for a given system and attribute. Variations are interpreted with respect to the meaning of the attributes (socio-economic descriptors as well as infrastructure) and the urban definitions used (understood as the combination of the three criteria). Because of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem and of the heterogeneous morphologies and social landscapes in the cities internal space, scaling estimations are subject to large variations, distorting many of the conclusions on which generative models are based. We conclude that examining scaling variations might be an opportunity to understand better the inner composition of cities with regard to their size, i.e. to link the scales of the city-system with the system of cities

Exploring the Development of Core Teaching Practices in the Context of Inquiry-based Science Instruction: An Interpretive Case Study

This paper describes our reflection on a clinical-based teacher preparation program. We examined a context in which novice pre-service teachers and a mentor teacher implemented inquiry-based science instruction to help students make sense of genetic engineering. We utilized developmental models of professional practice that outline the complexity inherent in professional knowledge as a conceptual framework to analyze teacher practice. Drawing on our analysis, we developed a typography of understandings of inquiry-based science instruction that teachers in our cohort held and generated a two dimensional model characterizing pathways through which teachers develop core teaching practices supporting inquiry-based science instruction

Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

Consciousness makes a difference: A reluctant dualist’s confession

This paper’s outline is as follows. In sections 1-3 I give an exposi-tion of the Mind-Body Problem, with emphasis on what I believe to be the heart of the problem, namely, the Percepts-Qualia Nonidentity and its incompatibility with the Physical Closure Paradigm. In 4 I present the “Qualia Inaction Postulate” underlying all non-interactionist theo-ries that seek to resolve the above problem. Against this convenient postulate I propose in section 5 the “Bafflement Ar¬gument,” which is this paper's main thesis. Sections 6-11 critically dis¬cuss attempts to dismiss the Bafflement Argument by the “Baf¬flement=Mis¬perception Equation.” Section 12 offers a refutation of all such attempts in the form of a concise “Asymmetry Proof.” Section 13 points out the bearing of the Bafflement Argument on the evolutionary role of consciousness while section 14 acknowledges the price that has to be paid for it in terms of basic physical principles. Section 15 summarizes the paper, pointing out the inescapability of interactionist dualism

Rate variation in language change: Toward distributional phylogenetic modeling

Since the advent of phylogenetic linguistics, researchers have used a large number of phylogenetic comparative methods adapted from computational biology to model and analyze the dynamics of change of a wide range of linguistic features. Models of this sort vary in complexity; the simplest models of change assume homogeneity of transition rates within families, while state-of-the-art models of heterotachy allow transition rates to vary across lineages within a family. In this contribution, I review a range of applications of biological models of rate variation to questions in diachronic linguistics and highlight some models from computational biology that have remained largely overlooked by linguists.Building off of these and other biological models, I sketch out a program for what I term DISTRIBUTIONAL PHYLOGENETIC MODELING, inspired by an analogousrecently proposed family of hierarchical Bayesian models. I report the results of some work in progress carried out within this framework and present a casestudy illustrating the flexibility of the approach