Morphological complexity of languages refle ts the settlement history of the Americas

Morphological complexity is widely believed to increase with sociolinguistic isolation, and to decrease with language spreads and absorption of L2 adult learner populations. However, this can be assessed only for communities with well-described histories. Morphological complexity has also been shown to be greater in higher-altitude languages, which are often sociolinguistically isolated, so we use altitude as an empirically determinable proxy for sociolinguistics. In past research, only a very few small locations have been surveyed and the measures of complexity used were family-specific and not easily generalizable. We apply several improved measures of complexity and show that the correlation holds, especially in the Andean regions of South America. We discuss the implications of the South American pattern for the settlement of the Americas and post-settlement prehistoric population formation.Peer reviewe

Tracking Typological Traits of Uralic Languages in Distributed Language Representations

Although linguistic typology has a long history, computational approaches have only recently gained popularity. The use of distributed representations in computational linguistics has also become increasingly popular. A recent development is to learn distributed representations of language, such that typologically similar languages are spatially close to one another. Although empirical successes have been shown for such language representations, they have not been subjected to much typological probing. In this paper, we first look at whether this type of language representations are empirically useful for model transfer between Uralic languages in deep neural networks. We then investigate which typological features are encoded in these representations by attempting to predict features in the World Atlas of Language Structures, at various stages of fine-tuning of the representations. We focus on Uralic languages, and find that some typological traits can be automatically inferred with accuracies well above a strong baseline.Comment: Finnish abstract included in the pape

Linking adult second language learning and diachronic change:a cautionary note

It has been suggested that the morphological complexity of a language is negatively correlated with the size of its population of speakers. This relationship may be driven by the proportion of non-native speakers, among other things, and reflects adaptations to learning constraints imposed by adult language learners. Here we sound a note of caution with respect to these claims by arguing that (a) morphological complexity is defined in somewhat contradictory ways and hence not straightforward to measure, and (b) there is insufficient evidence to suggest that children’s cognitive limitations support mechanisms beneficial for learning of complex morphology relative to adults. We suggest that considering the informational value of morphological cues may be a better way to capture learnability of morphology. To settle the issue of how age related constraints on learning might impact language change, more cross-linguistic studies comparing learning trajectories of different second languages and laboratory experiments examining language transmission in children and adults are needed

Lexical representation explains cortical entrainment during speech comprehension

Results from a recent neuroimaging study on spoken sentence comprehension have been interpreted as evidence for cortical entrainment to hierarchical syntactic structure. We present a simple computational model that predicts the power spectra from this study, even though the model's linguistic knowledge is restricted to the lexical level, and word-level representations are not combined into higher-level units (phrases or sentences). Hence, the cortical entrainment results can also be explained from the lexical properties of the stimuli, without recourse to hierarchical syntax.Comment: Submitted for publicatio