Commentary: The role of language contact in creating correlations between humidity and tone

Collins, Jeremy

doi:10.1093/jole/lzv012

Cited by 12 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…In this case, it suggests that the relationship between tone and humidity is not robust to controls for historical relationships, and in particular confounded by areal effects. This would fit with criticisms which suggest that borrowing is an important confound (Collins, 2016 ; Winter and Wedel, 2016 ). In robustness terms, the result is not structurally robust: the correlation does not survive controlling for the confound of contact.…”

Section: Testing the Robustness Of The Link Between Humidity And Tsupporting

confidence: 66%

“…It may be much easier to demonstrate confounds in a study than to correct for those confounds, which might mean that the possible criticisms of a hypothesis might develop much more quickly than the positive evidence for the hypothesis. One example of this comes from work in Collins ( 2016 ), which includes a computational simulation of a confounding mechanism (the diffusion of tone through local borrowing) before a simulation of the climatic hypothesis was developed. Given the slow progress of studies with new methods, it would be rash to dismiss (or fully accept) the original idea on the basis of a single study, and the incremental method advises patience on the part of researchers.…”

Section: Incremental Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, most previous analyses in this vein have concentrated on functional pressures from cognition (e.g., Bickel et al, 2015 ), rather than physical pressures from the ambient climate. Accordingly, the link between tone and humidity has been criticized on many grounds, both methodological and theoretical (see Everett et al, 2016a and responses: Collins, 2016 ; de Boer, 2016 ; Donohue, 2016 ; Ember, 2016a ; Gussenhoven, 2016 ; Hammarström, 2016 ; Ladd, 2016 ; Moran, 2016 ; Progovac and Ratliff, 2016 ; Winter and Wedel, 2016 ). The aim of this paper is not to address those criticisms, but to attempt to use this research to illustrate the maximum robustness method.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation

Roberts

2018

Front. Psychol.

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This paper discusses the maximum robustness approach for studying cases of adaptation in language. We live in an age where we have more data on more languages than ever before, and more data to link it with from other domains. This should make it easier to test hypotheses involving adaptation, and also to spot new patterns that might be explained by adaptation. However, there is not much discussion of the overall approach to research in this area. There are outstanding questions about how to formalize theories, what the criteria are for directing research and how to integrate results from different methods into a clear assessment of a hypothesis. This paper addresses some of those issues by suggesting an approach which is causal, incremental and robust. It illustrates the approach with reference to a recent claim that dry environments select against the use of precise contrasts in pitch. Study 1 replicates a previous analysis of the link between humidity and lexical tone with an alternative dataset and finds that it is not robust. Study 2 performs an analysis with a continuous measure of tone and finds no significant correlation. Study 3 addresses a more recent analysis of the link between humidity and vowel use and finds that it is robust, though the effect size is small and the robustness of the measurement of vowel use is low. Methodological robustness of the general theory is addressed by suggesting additional approaches including iterated learning, a historical case study, corpus studies, and studying individual speech.

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Section: Testing the Robustness Of The Link Between Humidity And Tsupporting

confidence: 66%

Section: Incremental Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation

Roberts

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…(Everett et al 2015) Nevertheless, this correlational finding may be due to coincidental patterns of borrowing across languages. (Collins 2016) To further complicate matters, associations between tonality and population-level genetic factors exist. (Dediu & Ladd 2007, Wong et al 2020) Such varied and complex associations point to the difficulty of disentangling causal mechanisms in such typological data, particularly since direct experimental evidence is difficult to derive for such hypotheses based on probabilistic mechanisms operating over millennia.…”

Section: Potential Adaptations Owing To Environmental Variation Acrosmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sound Systems of Languages Adapt, But to What Extent?

Everett

2021

CadLin

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The sound systems of the world’s languages adapt to biomechanical, aerodynamic and cognitive pressures associated with sound production and discrimination. Such pressures help to yield the greater frequency of some sound types and the reduced frequency of others. In this paper I explore such adaptation, pointing out that sound systems not only adapt to such pressures in ways that are clear from a typological perspective, but that they adapt in more subtle ways that are only now becoming apparent. Furthermore, I survey a host of recent studies suggesting that sound systems likely adapt to some pressures that vary across populations and environments. While the extent of adaptation to such variable pressures is certainly debatable, the mere existence of phonetic/phonological adaptation to pressures that differ across populations is increasingly well supported. The evidence in support of such adaptation ranges from large-scale quantitative data, to biomechanical modeling, to the speech of Freddie Mercury.

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“…The commentaries from Collins (2016), Moran (2016) and Donohue (2016) all argue that the histories of languages should be taken into account. Moran points out that climates have changed dramatically within the timescale of the spread of languages, and the present location of the speakers of a language may be far from the language's original homeland.…”

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confidence: 99%

Response: Climate and language: has the discourse shifted?

Everett

Blasí

Roberts

2016

Journal of Language Evolution

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We begin by thanking the respondents for their thoughtful comments and insightful leads. The overall impression we are left with by this exchange is one of progress, even if no consensus remains about the particular hypothesis we raise. To date, there has been a failure to seriously engage with the possibility that humans might adapt their communication to ecological factors. In these exchanges, we see signs of serious engagement with that possibility. Most respondents expressed agreement with the notion that our central premise-that language is ecologically adaptive-requires further exploration and may in fact be operative. We are pleased to see this shift in discourse, and to witness a heightening appreciation of possible ecological constraints on language evolution. It is that shift in discourse that represents progress in our view. Our hope is that future work will continue to explore these issues, paying careful attention to the fact that the human larynx is clearly sensitive to characteristics of ambient air. More generally, we think this exchange is indicative of the growing realization that inquiries into language development must consider potential external factors (see Dediu 2015).Having said that, much debate remains about our more specific hypothesis vis-a-vis tonality and desiccation. Is desiccation directly implicated in the global distribution of complex tonality? The best answer anyone can offer at this point, we think, is 'quite possibly'. Our distributional data remain highly suggestive but not conclusive (nor could they be), and the skeptical points raised in the comments are insightful but not conclusive either.(As we will demonstrate below.) Some of those comments do hint that the relationship between climate and tone might be indirect, and that more factors must be considered for the direct relationship we hypothesize to be more convincing. As we noted in our target piece, new kinds of data are required-the synchronic distributional data have probably taken us as far as they can. Yet new kinds of data are also needed to support the hypothesis that language is not ecologically adaptive. Much work remains to explore these issues. As Winter and Wedel (2016) note, this is an exciting period, as new sources of data and associated strands of research present themselves.Next we address principal objections/skepticisms. We focus first on de Boer's commentary (2016), which was the only one to engage with the crucial laryngology data. He suggests that (a) water vapor loss is likely a better indicator of the effects of desiccation than specific humidity and that, (b) while the impact of desiccated air on the vocal cords is evident in the laryngology data, the impact in question is minor. Claim (a) is interesting, but our account is not actually predicated on overall dehydration but on the effects of desiccation via air contact with the larynx. (Most of the desiccation/phonation studies we cite relate to ex-vivo or in-vivo exposure of the larynx to desiccated air.) Therefore, water vapor content in the...

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Commentary: The role of language contact in creating correlations between humidity and tone

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation

Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation

The Sound Systems of Languages Adapt, But to What Extent?

Response: Climate and language: has the discourse shifted?

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