Humans Who Read Grammars

*apologies for pay-walled links ahead* I was first confronted by spurious correlations in language and culture during the EVOLANG 10 conference in Vienna in 2014, where I think I saw a poster on the relationship between tense marking and economic behaviour. If I remember correctly, this poster build on the famous findings of Keith Chen, who published a paper in 2013 on the relationship between obligatory future tense marking and various types of social and economical decisions people take. The paper was very controversial before it was even published, with posts on Language Log (see links at bottom of the page for more posts)  a reply on Language Log by Keith Chen  and a variety of media coverage that can be found here and here and here  and here . Chen found that languages lacking a distinct future tense: "save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese" (abstract). He explains his findings as follows "[...] being require...

Lately I've been reading papers in diversity and evolutionary linguistics and some in biology. And I've also been creating mixtapes for friends. So, it occurred to me to make a mixtape of academic papers that go well together and that I think should be shared, and well.. here we are now. This is Hedvig's Evolutionary/Diversity Linguistics Mixtape Vol.1! It features s ome well-known classics, some perhaps lesser well-known ones. They're ordered al phabetically, but can be read ever which way. There's a link to a free PDF for almost all of the publications. The intention is not to create an exhaustive list of everything in evolutionary/diversity linguistics that is important (just like a mixtape of pop songs does not consist of all excellent pop songs), these publications have been especially selected for how they go together. They are also very suitable for new comers to these kinds of research questions, they're quite accessibly written and reada...

PLAY FISH COMMUNICATION GAME! Some mates of mine are doing an experiment involving a very short online task where you learn fish songs. You need android or Firefox if you're on a desktop computer to play. Play it and spread the word! For other games advancing science, check the "games" tag.

There are more and more exciting new tools cropping up for scientist to gather data, and in linguistics one new tool such is gaming! We just had a talk here at CoEDL at ANU from a researcher working on mutual intelligibility of closely related european languages - Charlotte Gooskens  - where they've been using games to investigate this question. Apropos that, I thought I'd let you all know about some games you can play that can further our understanding of language! Go play games, for science! Mutual understanding between closely related languages-game As a speaker of a major european language, how good are you at understanding your neighbours? Really... :)? Link to game. Link to science behind (don't look before playing!) LingQuest! How good are you at correctly identifying which language you're hearing? Test yourself on over 30 European languages and other languages from all over the world. Included are many languages currently under study in the DOBES-...

Magnus Enquist, evolutionary biologist from the Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution at Stockholm Univeristy Earlier, I blogged about the  Nijmegen Lectures by Russell Gray on language evolution . If you want even more lectures on language evolution, then why not watch the lectures from the Symposium on Language Acquisition and Language Evolution at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Stockholm University form 2011? They're all up and freely available  here ! If you're keen on these things, I recommend having a look through these videos and proceedings. I quote from the preface of the proceedings for the symposium: The symposium was intended as an opportunity for scientists from different research areas to interact and discuss complex dynamic systems in relation to the general theme of “Language Acquisition and Language Evolution”. Complex dynamic systems are characterised by hierarchical and combinatorial structures that can be found in quite di...

Every year the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Radboud University of Nijmegen invite one or several prominent scholars to give a series of talks on a current topic of their research. This is a great way to learn about important contemporary research in linguistics and the cognitive sciences. I just realised that I had not informed you about the fact that one can now find free online videos of these lectures online. In particular, I'd like to recommend last year's talk, which was on language evolution, a hot topic that I think will interest many readers of this blog. In 2014, they invited Russell Gray and he gave three talks on the topic of No Miracles! A Darwinian view of the evolution of cognition, language and culture Photo of Russell Gray at the Nijmegen lectures, taken from Seán Roberts post on the excellent blog Replicated Typo. In this lecture series Professor Gray argues that the research fields of animal cognition, language evolution and c...