Learning biases predict a word order universal

How recurrent typological patterns, or universals, emerge from the extensive diversity found across the world's languages constitutes a central question for linguistics and cognitive science. Recent challenges to a fundamental assumption of generative linguistics-that universal properties of the human language acquisition faculty constrain the types of grammatical systems which can occur-suggest the need for new types of empirical evidence connecting typology to biases of learners. Using an artificial language learning paradigm in which adult subjects are exposed to a mix of grammatical systems (similar to a period of linguistic change), we show that learners' biases mirror a word-order universal, first proposed by Joseph Greenberg, which constrains typological patterns of adjective, numeral, and noun ordering. We briefly summarize the results of a probabilistic model of the hypothesized biases and their effect on learning, and discuss the broader implications of the results for current theories of the origins of cross-linguistic word-order preferences.     

Why just turquoise? Remarks on the evolution of color terms

Summary The location of the foci of green and blue in the perceptual color solid indicates that there is space for a derived color term between these two hues. Diachronic and synchronic linguistic studies on color term lexica explain that a term for turquoise is likely to develop into a derived basic color term (in the Kay and McDaniel definition), at present in languages of industrialized countries. In addition to the hypothesis of Zimmer (1982) that türkis (in German) is the result of universal production system for color terms, cultural, social, and psychological factors influence the evolution of new basic color terms.     

Re-locating colors in the OSA space

A monolexemic color-naming experiment in the Italian language was performed on a sample of 1,014 colors obtained extending the OSA-UCS color system (E-OSA). Colors were rendered on a Mitsubishi Diamond pro 2070 monitor as patches subtending 10° of visual angle in a completely dark room. The 11 universal categories proposed by Berlin and Kay (Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution, 1969) were considered. Consensus, consistency and focal colors were determined for each category. Comparisons were performed among the results obtained using Boynton & Olson (B&O), the extended OSA (E-OSA), a subset of it covering almost all the B&O sample (R-OSA) and the Sturges & Whitfield (S&W) sample sets. A good overlap could be observed among the locations of the consensus colors in the {L, j, g} color model between B&O and R-OSA, as well as a close proximity among the centroids of homologue regions for the majority of the classes. The analysis of the location of focal colors versus the centroids suggests that an additional basic term could be missing for the Italian language in the blue category.     

Monotone Quantifiers Emerge via Iterated Learning

Natural languages exhibit many semantic universals, that is, properties of meaning shared across all languages. In this paper, we develop an explanation of one very prominent semantic universal, the monotonicity universal. While the existing work has shown that quantifiers satisfying the monotonicity universal are easier to learn, we provide a more complete explanation by considering the emergence of quantifiers from the perspective of cultural evolution. In particular, we show that quantifiers satisfy the monotonicity universal evolve reliably in an iterated learning paradigm with neural networks as agents.     

Color, reference, and expertise in language acquisition

In learning the meaning of a new term, children need to fix its reference, learn its conventional meaning, and discover the meanings with which it contrasts. To do this, children must attend to adult speakers--the experts--and to their patterns of use. In the domain of color, children need to identify color terms as such, fix the reference of each one, and learn how each is used in the language. But color is a property, and terms for properties appear to be more difficult to grasp than do those for objects, actions, and relations. Although children find some domains easier to learn than others, they depend in each case on the expertise of adult speakers.     

Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross‐linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross‐linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning.     

A Bayesian Model of Biases in Artificial Language Learning: The Case of a Word‐Order Universal

In this article, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian model of learning in a general type of artificial language‐learning experiment in which learners are exposed to a mixture of grammars representing the variation present in real learners’ input, particularly at times of language change. The modeling goal is to formalize and quantify hypothesized learning biases. The test case is an experiment ( Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012 ) targeting the learning of word‐order patterns in the nominal domain. The model identifies internal biases of the experimental participants, providing evidence that learners impose (possibly arbitrary) properties on the grammars they learn, potentially resulting in the cross‐linguistic regularities known as typological universals. Learners exposed to mixtures of artificial grammars tended to shift those mixtures in certain ways rather than others; the model reveals how learners’ inferences are systematically affected by specific prior biases. These biases are in line with a typological generalization—Greenberg's Universal 18—which bans a particular word‐order pattern relating nouns, adjectives, and numerals.     

Color naming: A mapping in the IMCS of common color terms

This study can be considered a follow-up of the investigations of basic color terms by Berlin & Kay and others following their paradigm. It is complementary to these inasmuch as a different method was used for identifying focal areas and boundaries of common color categories, namely semantic differential scales and isosemantic mapping. Further, colors from the entire color space were studied. No comparisons were made between languages, this study being only concerned with the Swedish language. The purpose of this study was to provide a more thorough mapping of the "spread gradients" in various areas of the NCS color space of color categories as represented by the most common color terms.     

Color naming and the phototoxic effects of sunlight on the eye

Many languages have no basic color term for "blue." Instead, they call short–wavelength stimuli "green" or "dark." We show that this cultural, linguistic phenomenon could result from accelerated aging of the eye because of high, chronic exposure to ultraviolet–B (UV–B) in sunlight (e.g., phototoxic lens brunescence). Reviewing 203 world languages, we found a significant relationship between UV dosage and color naming: In low–UV localities, languages generally have the word "blue"; in high–UV areas, languages without "blue" prevail. Furthermore, speakers of these non–"blue" languages often show blue–yellow color vision deficiency. We tested our phototoxicity hypothesis in a color–naming experiment, using computerized, colorimetric simulations of Munsell colors as viewed through clear and brunescent lenses. As predicted, our young subjects used "blue" as in English when the simulated lens was clear, but named colors as in tropical languages when the lens was dense. Our within–subjects design precludes a cultural explanation for this result.     

Learning to Manipulate and Categorize in Human and Artificial Agents

This study investigates the acquisition of integrated object manipulation and categorization abilities through a series of experiments in which human adults and artificial agents were asked to learn to manipulate two‐dimensional objects that varied in shape, color, weight, and color intensity. The analysis of the obtained results and the comparison of the behavior displayed by human and artificial agents allowed us to identify the key role played by features affecting the agent/environment interaction, the relation between category and action development, and the role of cognitive biases originating from previous knowledge.     

Language-specific and universal influences in children's syntactic packaging of Manner and Path: a comparison of English, Japanese, and Turkish

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the semantic elements of Manner and Path onto syntactic units when both the Manner and the Path of the moving Figure occur simultaneously and are salient in the event depicted. Both universal and language-specific patterns were evident in our data. Children used the semantic-syntactic mappings preferred by adult speakers of their own languages, and even expressed subtle syntactic differences that encode different relations between Manner and Path in the same way as their adult counterparts (i.e., Manner causing vs. incidental to Path). However, not all types of semantics-syntax mappings were easy for children to learn (e.g., expressing Manner and Path elements in two verbal clauses). In such cases, Turkish- and Japanese-speaking children frequently used syntactic patterns that were not typical in the target language but were similar to patterns used by English-speaking children, suggesting some universal influence. Thus, both language-specific and universal tendencies guide the development of complex spatial expressions.     

The development of color categories in two languages: a longitudinal study

This study unites investigations into the linguistic relativity of color categories with research on children's category acquisition. Naming, comprehension, and memory for colors were tracked in 2 populations over a 3-year period. Children from a seminomadic equatorial African culture, whose language contains 5 color terms, were compared with a group of English children. Despite differences in visual environment, language, and education, they showed similar patterns of term acquisition. Both groups acquired color vocabulary slowly and with great individual variation. Those knowing no color terms made recognition errors based on perceptual distance, and the influence of naming on memory increased with age. An initial perceptually driven color continuum appears to be progressively organized into sets appropriate to each culture and language.     

Language structure: psychological and social constraints

In this article we discuss the notion of a linguistic universal, and possible sources of such invariant properties of natural languages. In the first part, we explore the conceptual issues that arise. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the explanatory potential of horizontal evolution. We particularly focus on two case studies, concerning Zipf’s Law and universal properties of color terms, respectively. We show how computer simulations can be employed to study the large scale, emergent, consequences of psychologically and psychologically motivated assumptions about the working of horizontal language transmission.     

The evolution of frequency distributions: Relating regularization to inductive biases through iterated learning

The regularization of linguistic structures by learners has played a key role in arguments for strong innate constraints on language acquisition, and has important implications for language evolution. However, relating the inductive biases of learners to regularization behavior in laboratory tasks can be challenging without a formal model. In this paper we explore how regular linguistic structures can emerge from language evolution by iterated learning, in which one person’s linguistic output is used to generate the linguistic input provided to the next person. We use a model of iterated learning with Bayesian agents to show that this process can result in regularization when learners have the appropriate inductive biases. We then present three experiments demonstrating that simulating the process of language evolution in the laboratory can reveal biases towards regularization that might not otherwise be obvious, allowing weak biases to have strong effects. The results of these experiments suggest that people tend to regularize inconsistent word-meaning mappings, and that even a weak bias towards regularization can allow regular languages to be produced via language evolution by iterated learning.     

Quantitative Standards for Absolute Linguistic Universals

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross‐linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross‐linguistic analysis will very rarely be able to statistically justify absolute, inviolable patterns in language. We formalize two statistical methods—frequentist and Bayesian—and show that in both it is possible to find strict linguistic universals, but that the numbers of independent languages necessary to do so is generally unachievable. This suggests that methods other than typological statistics are necessary to establish absolute properties of human language, and thus that many of the purported universals in linguistics have not received sufficient empirical justification.     

彝族、白族和纳西族大学生的基本颜色词分类

运用自然分类和多维标度法,研究了彝族、白族和纳西族237名大学生对11种基本颜色词的分类。结果表明,三个民族的大学生对11种基本颜色词的分类有一致之处,但也有文化差异。主要表现在：⑴基本颜色词的分类数目不同;⑵基本颜色词的类别不同;⑶基本颜色词语义空间的维度不完全相同;⑷每一类别中包含的颜色词及颜色词的数目不同。这些差异体现了文化和语言对颜色认知的影响     

Do the colors of your letters depend on your language? Language-dependent and universal influences on grapheme-color synesthesia in seven languages

Grapheme-color synesthetes experience graphemes as having a consistent color (e.g., “N is turquoise”). Synesthetes’ specific associations (which letter is which color) are often influenced by linguistic properties such as phonetic similarity, color terms (“Y is yellow”), and semantic associations (“D is for dog and dogs are brown”). However, most studies of synesthesia use only English-speaking synesthetes. Here, we measure the effect of color terms, semantic associations, and non-linguistic shape-color associations on synesthetic associations in Dutch, English, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. The effect size of linguistic influences (color terms, semantic associations) differed significantly between languages. In contrast, the effect size of non-linguistic influences (shape-color associations), which we predicted to be universal, indeed did not differ between languages. We conclude that language matters (outcomes are influenced by the synesthete’s language) and that synesthesia offers an exceptional opportunity to study influences on letter representations in different languages.     

Language as shaped by the brain

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a "moving target" both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG--the mesh between learners and languages--arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent "organism," which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.     

Salient Color Terms in Four Languages

Elicited lists of color terms were used to investigate the relative salience of basic and nonbasic color terms in four languages. Salience was operationalized in terms of frequency of mention and mean rank sequence of appearance on the lists. Primary basic terms were generally found to be the most salient, followed by derived basic and nonbasic terms, in that order. However, in some of the group lists the nonbasic terms beige, turquoise, navy blue and sky blue were found to have higher frequencies of mention and/or higher mean sequence ranks than some derived basic terms. The possible basicness of these terms is discussed.     

Color categories are not universal: replications and new evidence from a stone-age culture

The authors sought to replicate and extend the work of E. Rosch Heider (1972) on the Dani with a comparable group from Papua, New Guinea, who speak Berinmo, which has 5 basic color terms. Naming and memory for highly saturated focal, non-focal, and low-saturation stimuli from around the color space were investigated. Recognition of desaturated colors was affected by color vocabulary. When response bias was controlled, there was no recognition advantage for focal stimuli. Paired-associate learning also failed to show an advantage for focal stimuli. Categorical Perception effects for both English and Berinmo were found, but only at the boundaries of existing linguistic categories. It is concluded that possession of linguistic categories facilitates recognition and influences perceptual judgments.