The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the world’s largest and most prominent families, spoken by nearly 1.4 billion people. Despite the importance of the Sino-Tibetan languages, their prehistory remains controversial, with ongoing debate about when and where they originated. To shed light on this debate we develop a database of comparative linguistic data, and apply the linguistic comparative method to identify sound correspondences and establish cognates. We then use phylogenetic methods to infer the relationships among these languages and estimate the age of their origin and homeland. Our findings point to Sino-Tibetan originating with north Chinese millet farmers around 7200 B.P. and suggest a link to the late Cishan and the early Yangshao cultures.

A cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in babbling was carried out. 1047 vowels produced by twenty 10-monthold infants from Parisian French, London English, Hong Kong Cantonese and Algiers Arabic language backgrounds were recorded in the cities of origin and spectrally analysed. F1-F2 plots of these vowels were obtained for each subject and each language group. Statistical analyses provide evidence of differences between infants across language backgrounds. These differences parallel those found in adult speech in the corresponding languages. Implications of an early build-up of targetlanguage-oriented production skills are discussed.

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Samples of babbling productions of 6-, 8- and 10-month-old infants from different language backgrounds were presented to adult judges whose task was to identify the infants from their own linguistic community. The results show that certain language-specific metaphonological cues render this identification possible when the samples exhibit long and coherent intonation patterns. The segmental indications that are present in the fully syllabic productions of canonical babbling do not allow the judges to identify the infants correctly from their own linguistic community. These results seem to support the hypothesis of an early influence on babbling of the metaphonological characteristics of the target language.

This paper presents a new higher phylogeny for the Austronesian family, based on three independent lines of evidence: the observation of a hierarchy of implications among the numerals from 5 to 10 in the languages of Formosa and in PMP; the finding that the numerals *pitu '7', *walu '8', and *Siwa '9' can be derived from longer additive expressions meaning 5+2, 5+3, and 5+4, preserved in Pazeh, using only six sound changes; and the observation that the phylogeny that can be extracted from these and other innovations—mostly changes in the basic vocabulary—evinces a coherent spatial pattern, whereby an initial Austronesian settlement in NW Taiwan expanded unidirectionally counterclockwise along the coastal plain, circling the island in a millennium or so. In the proposed phylogeny, Malayo-Polynesian is a branch of Muic, a taxon that also includes NE Formosan (Kavalan plus Ketagalan). The ancestor language, Muish, is deemed to have been spoken in or near NE Formosa. Further evidence that the Tai-Kadai languages, contrary to common sense, are a subgroup of Austronesian (specifically: a branch of Muic, coordinate with PMP and NE Formosan) is presented.

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