Evolution and trade-off dynamics of functional load

Functional load (FL) quantifies the contributions by phonological contrasts to distinctions made across the lexicon. Previous research has linked particularly low values of FL to sound change. Here, we broaden the scope of enquiry into FL to its evolution at higher values also. We apply phylogenetic methods to examine the diachronic evolution of FL across 90 languages of the Pama–Nyungan (PN) family of Australia. We find a high degree of phylogenetic signal in FL, indicating that FL values covary closely with genealogical structure across the family. Though phylogenetic signals have been reported for phonological structures, such as phonotactics, their detection in measures of phonological function is novel. We also find a significant, negative correlation between the FL of vowel length and of the following consonant—that is, a time-depth historical trade-off dynamic, which we relate to known allophony in modern PN languages and compensatory sound changes in their past. The findings reveal a historical dynamic, similar to transphonologization, which we characterize as a flow of contrastiveness between subsystems of the phonology. Recurring across a language family that spans a whole continent and many millennia of time depth, our findings provide one of the most compelling examples yet of Sapir’s ‘drift’ hypothesis of non-accidental parallel development in historically related languages

Gender bias and stereotypes in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in the past several months, shattering state-of-the-art benchmarks in many domains. This paper investigates LLMs' behavior with respect to gender stereotypes, a known issue for prior models. We use a simple paradigm to test the presence of gender bias, building on but differing from WinoBias, a commonly used gender bias dataset, which is likely to be included in the training data of current LLMs. We test four recently published LLMs and demonstrate that they express biased assumptions about men and women's occupations. Our contributions in this paper are as follows: (a) LLMs are 3-6 times more likely to choose an occupation that stereotypically aligns with a person's gender; (b) these choices align with people's perceptions better than with the ground truth as reflected in official job statistics; (c) LLMs in fact amplify the bias beyond what is reflected in perceptions or the ground truth; (d) LLMs ignore crucial ambiguities in sentence structure 95% of the time in our study items, but when explicitly prompted, they recognize the ambiguity; (e) LLMs provide explanations for their choices that are factually inaccurate and likely obscure the true reason behind their predictions. That is, they provide rationalizations of their biased behavior. This highlights a key property of these models: LLMs are trained on imbalanced datasets; as such, even with the recent successes of reinforcement learning with human feedback, they tend to reflect those imbalances back at us. As with other types of societal biases, we suggest that LLMs must be carefully tested to ensure that they treat minoritized individuals and communities equitably.Comment: ACM Collective Intelligenc

Gender representation in linguistic example sentences

Prior studies have shown that example sentences in syntax textbooks systematically under-represent women and perpetuate gender stereotypes (Macaulay & Brice 1994, 1997; Pabst et al. 2018). We examine the articles published over the past 20 years in Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, and find striking similarities to this prior work. Among our findings, we show a stark imbalance of male (N=10807) to female (N=5019) arguments, and that male-gendered arguments are more likely to be subjects, and female arguments non-subjects. We show that female-gendered arguments are less likely to be referred to using pronouns and are more likely to be referred to using a kinship term, whereas male-gendered arguments are more likely to have occupations and to perpetrate violence. We show that this pattern has remained stable, with very little change, over the course of the twenty years that we examine, leading up to the present day. We conclude with a brief discussion of possible remedies and suggestions for improvement

Pama-Nyungan grandparent systems change with grandchildren, but not cross-cousin terms or social norms

Kinship is a fundamental and universal aspect of the structure of human society. The kinship category of ‘grandparents’ is socially salient, due to grandparents’ investment in the care of the grandchildren as well as to older generations’ control of wealth and cultural knowledge, but the evolutionary dynamics of grandparent terms has yet to be studied in a phylogenetically explicit context. Here, we present the first phylogenetic comparative study of grandparent terms by investigating 134 languages in Pama-Nyungan, an Australian family of hunter-gatherer languages. We infer that proto-Pama-Nyungan had, with high certainty, four separate terms for grandparents. This state then shifted into either a two-term system that distinguishes the genders of the grandparents or a three-term system that merges the ‘parallel’ grandparents, which could then transition into a different three-term system that merges the ‘cross’ grandparents. We find no support for the co-evolution of these systems with either community marriage organisation or post-marital residence. We find some evidence for the correlation of grandparent and grandchild terms, but no support for the correlation of grandparent and cross-cousin terms, suggesting that grandparents and grandchildren potentially form a single lexical category but that the entire kinship system does not necessarily change synchronously

Text-Speech Alignment: A Robin Hood Approach for Endangered Languages

Forced alignment automatically aligns audio recordings of spoken language with transcripts at the level of individual sounds, greatly reducing the time required to prepare data for linguistic analysis. However, existing algorithms are mostly trained on a few well-documented languages. We test the performance of three algorithms against manually aligned data on data from a highly endangered language. At least some tasks, unsupervised alignment (either based on English or trained from a small corpus) is sufficiently reliable for it to be used on legacy data for low-resource languages. Descriptive phonetic work on vowel inventories and prosody can be accurately captured by automatic alignment with minimal training data. Underutilized legacy data exist for many endangered languages. This creates both a need and an opportunity to leverage new technology

Septal ablation in hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy improves systolic myocardial function in the lateral (free wall): a follow-up study using CMR tissue tagging and 3D strain analysis

Aims: Alcohol septal ablation (ASA) has been successful in the treatment of symptomatic hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy (HOCM). The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of ethanol-induced myocardial infarcts on regional myocardial function using cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) tissue tagging and 3-dimensional (3D) strain analysis. Methods and results: In nine patients (age 52±15 years) who underwent ASA, CMR was performed prior to and 6 months after the procedure. Regional myocardial mass was evaluated using cine imaging. Myocardial tagging was used to calculate systolic 3D myocardial strain values. These strain values were used to calculate the shortening index (SI), a robust parameter for myocardial contraction. Maximum end-systolic (ES) SI and systolic SI rate were quantified in three circumferential segments: septum, adjacent, and remote (lateral) myocardium. Compared with baseline, septal and non-septal mass decreased at follow-up (from 72±27 to 59±21 g; P=0.008 and from 131±34 to 109±30 g; P=0.008, respectively). In the septum, maximum ES SI and SI rate remained unchanged after ASA. In adjacent myocardium, ES SI remained unchanged, whereas SI rate improved (from -56.5±21.1 to -70.0±16.7%/s; P=0.02). Both ES SI and SI rate improved significantly in remote myocardium (from -16.9±2.8 to -18.8±3.2%; P=0.02 and from -70.3±9.2 to -86.1±15.0%/s; P=0.01, respectively). Conclusion: Reduction of left ventricular (LV) outflow tract obstruction in symptomatic HOCM is associated with a significant reduction in myocardial mass and improvement of intramural systolic function in the lateral (remote) wall, indicating reversed LV remodelling. © The European Society of Cardiology 2006. All rights reserved