On empirical methodology, constraints, and hierarchy in artificial grammar learning

This paper considers the AGL literature from a psycholinguistic perspective. It first presents a taxonomy of the experimental familiarization test procedures used, which is followed by a consideration of shortcomings and potential improvements of the empirical methodology. It then turns to reconsidering the issue of grammar learning from the point of view of acquiring constraints, instead of the traditional AGL approach in terms of acquiring sets of rewrite rules. This is, in particular, a natural way of handling long‐distance dependences. The final section addresses an underdeveloped issue in the AGL literature, namely how to detect latent hierarchical structure in AGL response patterns

Persistent Topology of Syntax

We study the persistent homology of the data set of syntactic parameters of the world languages. We show that, while homology generators behave erratically over the whole data set, non-trivial persistent homology appears when one restricts to specific language families. Different families exhibit different persistent homology. We focus on the cases of the Indo-European and the Niger-Congo families, for which we compare persistent homology over different cluster filtering values. We investigate the possible significance, in historical linguistic terms, of the presence of persistent generators of the first homology. In particular, we show that the persistent first homology generator we find in the Indo-European family is not due (as one might guess) to the Anglo-Norman bridge in the Indo-European phylogenetic network, but is related to the position of Ancient Greek and the Hellenic branch within the network.Comment: 15 pages, 25 jpg figure

From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

Steven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF)

Why We Still Need Knowledge of Language

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