Table of Contents
Brain Mechanisms Of Human Acoustic Communication: A Phylogenetic Approach And Its Ontogenetic Implications
Hermann Ackermann, Wolfram Ziegler
Pre And Post Partum Whistle Production Of A Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops Truncatus) Mother-calf Dyad
Audra Ames, Sara Wielandt, Dianne Cameron, Stan Kuczaj
Noise In Phonology Affects Encoding Strategies In Morphology
David Ardell, Noelle Anderson, Bodo Winter
On A Music-ready Brain: Neural Basis, Mechanisms, And Their Contribution To The Language Evolution
Rie Asano, Edward Ruoyang Shi
Adult Language Learning And The Evolution Of Linguistic Complexity
Mark Atkinson, Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby
A Lotka-volterra Model Of The Evolutionary Dynamics Of Compositionality Markers
Andreas Baumann, Christina Prömer, Kamil Kazmierski, Nikolaus Ritt
The Low-complexity-belt: Evidence For Large-scale Language Contact In Human Prehistory?
Christian Bentz
Redundant Features Are Less Likely To Survive: Empirical Evidence From The Slavic Languages
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Hanne Eckhoff
Spontaneous Dialect Formation In A Population Of Locally Aligning Agents
Richard A. Blythe, Alistair H. Jones, Jessica Renton
How The Brain Got Grammaticalized: Globularization And (self-)domestication
Cedric Boeckx, Constantina Theofanopoulou, Antonio Benítez-Burraco
Signature Whistles In An Introduction Context
Megan Broadway, Jamie Klaus, Billie Serafin, Heidi Lyn
Cultural Evolution And Communication Yield Structured Languages In An Open-ended World
Jon W. Carr, Kenny Smith, Hannah Cornish, Simon Kirby
Are Emotional Displays An Evolutionary Precursor To Compositionality In Language?
Federica Cavicchio, Livnat Leemor, Simone Shamay-Tsoory, Wendy Sandler
Functionally Flexible Vocalizations In Wild Bonobos (pan Pansicus)
Zanna Clay, Jahmaira Archbold, Klaus Zuberbuhler
Dwarf Mongooses Combine Meaningful Alarm Calls
Katie Collier, Andrew N. Radford, Balthasar Bickel, Marta B. Manser, Simon W. Townsend
Word Order Universals Reflect Cognitive Biases: Evidence From Silent Gesture
Jennifer Culbertson, Simon Kirby, Marieke Schouwstra
The Emergence Of Rules And Exceptions In A Population Of Interacting Agents
Christine Cuskley, Vittorio Loreto
The Evolution Of Collaborative Stories
Christine Cuskley, Bernardo Monechi, Pietro Gravino, Vittorio Loreto
Anatomical Biasing Of Click Learning And Production: An MRI And 3d Palate Imaging Study
Dan Dediu, Scott Moisik
Meaningful Call Combinations And Compositional Processing In A Social Bird
Sabrina Engesser, Amanda R. Ridley, Simon W. Townsend
The Emergence Of The Progressive To Imperfective Diachronic Cycle In Reinforcement-learning Agents
Dankmar Enke, Roland Mühlenbernd, Igor Yanovich
Using HMMs To Attribute Structure To Artificial Languages
Kerem Eryilmaz, Hannah Little, Bart de Boer
Stick Or Switch: A Simple Selection Heuristic May Drive Adaptive Langauge Evolution
Nicolas Fay, Shane Rogers
Processing Preferences Shape Language Change
Maryia Fedzechkina, Becky Chu, T. Florian Jaeger, John Trueswell
Communicative Interaction Leads To The Elimination Of Unpredictable Variation
Olga Feher, Kenny Smith, Elizabeth Wonnacott, Nikolaus Ritt
Multimodal Processing Of Emotional Meanings: A Hypothesis On The Adaptive Value Of Prosody
Piera Filippi, Sebastian Ocklenburg, Daniel Liu Bowling, Larissa Heege, Albert Newen, Onur Güntürkün, Bart de Boer
Humans Recognize Vocal Expressions Of Emotional States Universally Across Species
Piera Filippi, Jenna V. Congdon, John Hoang, Daniel Liu Bowling, Stephan Reber, Andrius Pašukonis, Marisa Hoeschele, Sebastian Ocklenburg, Bart de Boer, Christopher B. Sturdy, Albert Newen, Onur GÜntÜrkÜn
Do Lab Attested Biases Predict The Structure Of A New Natural Language?
Molly Flaherty, Katelyn Stangl, Susan Goldin-Meadow
Cooperative Communication And Communication Styles In Bonobos And Chimpanzees In The Wild: Same Same But Different?
Marlen Fröhlich, Paul H Kuchenbuch, Gudrun Müller, Barbara Fruth, Takeshi Furuichi, Roman M Wittig, Simone Pika
Migration As A Window Into The Coevolution Between Language And Behavior
Victor Gay, Daniel Hicks, Estefania Santacreu-Vasut
Effects Of Task-specific Variables On Auditory Artificial Grammar Learning And Generalization
Andreea Geambasu, Michelle J. Spierings, Carel ten Cate, Clara C. Levelt
The Impact Of Communicative Network Structure On The Conventionalization Of Referring Expressions In Gesture
Matt Hall, Russell Richie, Marie Coppola
Plain Simple Complex Structures: The Emergence Of Overspecification In An Iterated Learning Setup
Stefan Hartmann, Peeter Tinits, Jonas Nölle, Thomas Hartmann, Michael Pleyer
Language Origins In Light Of Neuro-atypical Cognition And Speech Profiles
Wolfram Hinzen, Joana Rosselló
Nonlinear Biases In Articulation Constrain The Design Space Of Language
Rick Janssen, Bodo Winter, Dan Dediu, Scott Moisik, Sean Roberts
Simple Agents Are Able To Replicate Speech Sounds Using 3d Vocal Tract Model
Rick Janssen, Dan Dediu, Scott Moisik
The Evolution Of Zipf’s Law Of Abbreviation
Jasmeen Kanwal, Kenny Smith, Jennifer Culbertson, Simon Kirby
The Spontaneous Emergence Of Linguistic Diversity In An Artificial Language
Deborah Kerr, Kenny Smith
A General Auditory Bias For Handling Speaker Variability In Speech? Evidence In Humans And Songbirds.
Buddhamas Kriengwatana, Paola Escudero, Anne Kerkhoven, Carel ten Cate
Cumulative Vocal Cultures In Orangutans And Their Ontogenetic Origin
Adriano Lameira, Jeremy Kendal, Marco Gamba
Learnability Pressures Influence The Encoding Of Information Density In The Lexicon
Molly Lewis, Michael C. Frank
A Developmental Perspective On Language Origin: Children Are Old Hands At Gesture
Casey Lister, Tiarn Burtenshaw, Nicolas Fay, Bradley Walker, Jeneva Ohan
Emergence Of Signal Structure: Effects Of Duration Constraints
Hannah Little, Kerem Eryılmaz, Bart de Boer
Differing Signal-meaning Dimensionalities Facilitates The Emergence Of Structure
Hannah Little, Kerem Eryılmaz, Bart de Boer
Correlated Evolution Or Not? Phylogenetic Linguistics With Syntactic, Cognacy, And Phonetic Data
Giuseppe Longobardi, Armin Buch, Andrea Ceolin, Aaron Ecay, Cristina Guardiano, Monica Irimia, Dimitris Michelioudakis, Nina Radkevich, Gerhard Jaeger
Nonhuman Animals’ Use Of Ostensive Cues In An Object Choice Task
Heidi Lyn, Stephanie Jett, Megan Broadway, Mystera Samuelson
Preliminary Results From A Computational Multi Agent Modelling Approach To Study Humpback Whale Song Cultural Transmission
Michael Mcloughlin, Luca Lamoni, Ellen Garland, Simon Ingram, Alexis Kirke, Michael Noad, Luke Rendell, Eduardo Miranda
Human-like Brain Specialization In Baboons: An Invo Anatomical MRI Study Of Language Areas Homologs In 96 Subjects
Adrien Meguerditchian, Damien Marie, Konstantina Margiotoudi, Scott A. Love, Alice Bertello, Romain Lacoste, Muriel Roth, Bruno Nazarian, Jean-Luc Anton, Olivier Coulon
Linking The Processes Of Language Evolution And Language Change: A Five-level Hierarchy
Jérôme Michaud
Interaction For Facilitating Conventionalization: Negotiating The Silent Gesture Communication Of Noun-verb Pairs
Ashley Micklos
Make New With Old: Human Language In Phylogenetically Ancient Brain Regions
Marie Montant, Johannes Ziegler, Benny Briesemeister, Tila Brink, Bruno Wicker, Aurélie Ponz, Mireille Bonnard, Arthur Jacobs, Mario Braun
Linguistic Structure Emerges In The Cultural Evolution Of Artificial Sign Languages
Yasamin Motamedi, Marieke Schouwstra, Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby
Self-organization In Sound Systems: A Model Of Sound Strings Processing Agents
Roland Mühlenbernd, Johannes Wahle
Shared Basis For Language And Mathematics Revealed By Cross-domain Syntactic Priming
Tomoya Nakai, Kazuo Okanoya
Measuring Conventionalization In The Manual Modality
Savithry Namboodiripad, Daniel Lenzen, Ryan Lepic, Tessa Verhoef
The Arbitrariness Of The Sign Revisited: The Role Of Phonological Similarity
Alan Nielsen, Dieuwke Hupkes, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith
Semantic Approximation And Its Effect On The Development Of Lexical Conventions
Bill Noble, Raquel Fernández
Parrot " Phonological Regression": Expanding Our Understanding Of The Evolution Of Vocal Learning
Irene M. Pepperberg, Katia Zilber-Izhar, Scott Smith
Early Learned Words Are More Iconic
Lynn Perry, Marcus Perlman, Gary Lupyan, Bodo Winter, Dominic Massaro
What Kind Of Grammar Did Early Humans (and Neanderthals) Command? A Linguistic Reconstruction
Ljiljana Progovac
The Cultural Evolution Of Structure In Music And Language
Andrea Ravignani, Tania Delgado, Simon Kirby
Languages Support Efficient Communication About The Environment: Words For Snow Revisited
Terry Regier, Alexandra Carstensen, Charles Kemp
Strategies In Gesture And Sign For Demoting An Agent: Effects Of Language Community And Input
Lilia Rissman, Laura Horton, Molly Flaherty, Marie Coppola, Annie Senghas, Diane Brentari, Susan Goldin-Meadow
Social Biases Versus Efficient Communication: An Iterated Learning Study
Gareth Roberts, Mariya Fedzechkina
The Cultural Evolution Of Complexity In Linguistic Structure
Carmen Saldana, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith
Skepticism Towards Skepticism Towards Computer Simulation In Evolutionary Linguistics
Carlos Santana
Active Control Of Complexity Growth In Naming Games: Hearer's Choice
William Schueller, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Children's Production Of Determiners As A Test Case For Innate Syntactic Categories
Catriona Silvey, Christos Christodoulopoulos
Vocal Learning In Functionally Referential Chimpanzee Food Calls
Katie Slocombe, Stuart Watson, Anne Schel, Claudia Wilke, Emma Wallace, Leveda Cheng, Victoria West, Simon Townsend
Chimpanzees Process Structural Isomorphisms Across Sensory Modalities
Ruth Sonnweber, Andrea Ravignani
Rule Learning In Birds: Zebra Finches Generalize By Positional Similarities, Budgerigars By The Structural Rules.
Michelle Spierings, Carel ten Cate
Metalinguistic Awareness Of Trends As A Driving Force In Language Change: An Empirical Study
Kevin Stadler, Elyse Jamieson, Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby
Evidence Of Descent With Modification And Selection In Iterated Learning Experiments
Monica Tamariz, Joleana Shurley
What Is Unique About The Evolution Of Language Compared To Other Cultural Domains? An Experimental Study Of Language, Technology And Art
Monica Tamariz, Jon W. Carr
Learning To Learn From Similar Others: Approximate Bayesian Computation Through Babbling
Bill Thompson, Heikki Rasilo
Arbitrariness Of Iconicity: The Sources (and Forces) Of (dis)similarities In Iconic Representations
Oksana Tkachman, Carla L. Hudson Kam
Experimental Evidence For Phonemic-like Contrasts In A Nonhuman Vocal System
Simon Townsend, Andrew Russell, Sabrina Engesser
Modeling The Emergence Of Creole Languages
Francesca Tria, Vittorio Loreto, Vito Servedio, S. Mufwene Salikoko
Constituent Order In Pictorial Representations Of Events Is Influenced By Language
Anu Vastenius, Jordan Zlatev, Joost Van de Weijer
Iconicity, Naturalness And Systematicity In The Emergence Of Sign Language Structure
Tessa Verhoef, Carol Padden, Simon Kirby
Language Evolution And Language Origins In Teaching Linguistics At The University Level
Slawomir Wacewicz, Przemyslaw Zywiczynski, Arkadiusz Jasinski
Rethinking Zipf’s Frequency-meaning Relationship: Implications For The Evolution Of Word Meaning
Bodo Winter, David Ardell
The Structure Of Iconicity In The English Lexicon
Bodo Winter, Lynn Perry, Marcus Perlman, Gary Lupyan
The Cultural Co-evolution Of Language And Mindreading
Marieke Woensdregt, Kenny Smith, Chris Cummins, Simon Kirby
A Game Theoretic Account Of Semantic Subjectification In The Cultural Evolution Of Languages
Eva Zehentner, Andreas Baumann, Nikolaus Ritt, Christina Prömer
Strategies In Gesture And Sign For Demoting An Agent: Effects Of Language Community And Input
Lilia Rissman1
, Laura Horton1
, Molly Flaherty1
, Marie Coppola2
, Annie Senghas3
, Diane Brentari1
and Susan Goldin-Meadow1
1 University of Chicago
2 Unniversity of Connecticut
3 Columbia University
Keywords: Nicaraguan Sign Language, Agency, Verbal morphology, Language emergence, Gesture
Short description: Across cohorts of Nicaraguan Sign Language, changes in how signers describe agentive events.
Abstract:
Languages use a variety of devices to indicate that an agent is present in an event, but is not particularly salient, e.g., passive voice (see Siewierska, 2013). Here we investigate agent-demotion devices in an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) began when Homesigners (deaf individuals who use homemade gestures to communicate with hearing individuals) were brought together for the first time in the late 1970s (Cohort 1 signers). Cohort 2 signers entered the community after 1984, and Cohort 3 signers joined after 1994; these later cohorts learned their sign language from the previous generations. We asked Homesigners, Cohort 1 signers, and Cohort 2-3 signers to describe vignettes that varied in how salient the agent was. All groups used verbal morphology to distinguish agentive vs. non-agentive scenes. However, only signers who learned their language from older peers (i.e., Cohorts 2-3) used verbal morphology to distinguish between strong and weak agents, suggesting that it is possible to create linguistic devices to distinguish agents from non-agents without a language model, but using these devices to demote agents occurs only when the language is transmitted to the next generation of learners.
Citation:
Rissman L., Horton L., Flaherty M., Coppola M., Senghas A., Brentari D. and Goldin-Meadow S. (2016). Strategies In Gesture And Sign For Demoting An Agent: Effects Of Language Community And Input. In S.G. Roberts, C. Cuskley, L. McCrohon, L. Barceló-Coblijn, O. Fehér & T. Verhoef (eds.) The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG11). Available online: http://evolang.org/neworleans/papers/158.html
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
© Rissman, Horton, Flaherty, Coppola, Senghas, Brentari, Goldin-Meadow 2016