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"Roberts, G"
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The wonders of language : or How to make noises and influence people
\"Ian Roberts offers a stimulating introduction to our greatest gift as a species: our capacity for articulate language. We are mostly as blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the structure of language as fish are of the water they swim in. We live in a mental ocean of nouns, verbs, quantifiers, morphemes, vowels and other rich, strange and deeply fascinating linguistic objects. This book introduces the reader to this amazing world. Offering a thought-provoking and accessible introduction to the main discoveries and theories about language, the book is aimed at general readers and undergraduates who are curious about linguistics and language. Written in a lively and direct style, technical terms are carefully introduced and explained and the book includes a full glossary. The book covers all the central areas of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages
We summarize a number of findings in laryngology demonstrating that perturbations of phonation, including increased jitter and shimmer, are associated with desiccated ambient air. We predict that, given the relative imprecision of vocal fold vibration in desiccated versus humid contexts, arid and cold ecologies should be less amenable, when contrasted to warm and humid ecologies, to the development of languages with phonemic tone, especially complex tone. This prediction is supported by data fromtwo large independently coded databases representing 3,700+ languages. Languages with complex tonality have generally not developed in very cold or otherwise desiccated climates, in accordance with the physiologically based predictions. The predicted global geographic–linguistic association is shown to operate within continents, within major language families, and across language isolates. Our results offer evidence that human sound systems are influenced by environmental factors.
Journal Article
Future Tense and Economic Decisions: Controlling for Cultural Evolution
A previous study by Chen demonstrates a correlation between languages that grammatically mark future events and their speakers' propensity to save, even after controlling for numerous economic and demographic factors. The implication is that languages which grammatically distinguish the present and the future may bias their speakers to distinguish them psychologically, leading to less future-oriented decision making. However, Chen's original analysis assumed languages are independent. This neglects the fact that languages are related, causing correlations to appear stronger than is warranted (Galton's problem). In this paper, we test the robustness of Chen's correlations to corrections for the geographic and historical relatedness of languages. While the question seems simple, the answer is complex. In general, the statistical correlation between the two variables is weaker when controlling for relatedness. When applying the strictest tests for relatedness, and when data is not aggregated across individuals, the correlation is not significant. However, the correlation did remain reasonably robust under a number of tests. We argue that any claims of synchronic patterns between cultural variables should be tested for spurious correlations, with the kinds of approaches used in this paper. However, experiments or case-studies would be more fruitful avenues for future research on this specific topic, rather than further large-scale cross-cultural correlational studies.
Journal Article
Towards Inverse Modeling of Landscapes Using the Wasserstein Distance
Extricating histories of uplift and erosion from landscapes is crucial for many branches of the Earth sciences. An objective way to calculate such histories is to identify calibrated models that minimize misfit between observations (e.g., topography) and predictions (e.g., synthetic landscapes). In the presence of natural or computational noise, widely used Euclidean measures of similarity can have complicated objective functions, obscuring the search for optimal models. Instead, we introduce the Wasserstein distance as a means to measure misfit between observed and theoretical landscapes. Our results come in two parts. First, we show that this approach can generate much smoother objective functions than Euclidean measures, simplifying the search for optimal models. Second, we show how locations and amplitudes of uplift can be accurately recovered from synthetic landscapes even when seeded with different noisy initial conditions. We suggest that this approach holds promise for inverting real landscapes for their histories. Plain Language Summary The shapes of Earth's landscapes tell us about how they were formed by processes like tectonic uplift and erosion. Mathematical models are used to predict how landscapes change over time due to these processes. However, identifying models that produce theoretical landscapes that resemble reality can be challenging. One way to do so is by comparing model predictions to actual landscapes we observe. To make this comparison, we need a way to measure how similar or different predicted and observed landscapes are. One common approach is to compare heights of land from both cases. However, this method can struggle because a small shift in the position of a theoretical valley, say, can dramatically change the outcome of a comparison. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach that uses a metric called the Wasserstein distance from the field of “Optimal Transport.” The Wasserstein distance is a measure of how different two probability distributions are from each other by considering how much “work” is needed to transform one distribution into the other. We show that this metric is effective for finding models to understand how landscapes were shaped by uplift over time. Key Points The use of the Wasserstein distance for identifying optimal landscape evolution models is demonstrated This approach can produce simple objective functions, simplifying the search for models that minimize data misfit Accurate amplitudes and locations of uplift can be retrieved from synthetic landscapes generated using different initial conditions
Journal Article
Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages
Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. This predicts that humans ought to be better at communicating about sight and hearing than the other senses, and decades of work based on English and related languages certainly suggests this is true. However, how well does this reflect the diversity of languages and communities worldwide? To test whether there is a universal hierarchy of the senses, stimuli from the five basic senses were used to elicit descriptions in 20 diverse languages, including 3 unrelated sign languages. We found that languages differ fundamentally in which sensory domains they linguistically code systematically, and how they do so. The tendency for better coding in some domains can be explained in part by cultural preoccupations. Although languages seem free to elaborate specific sensory domains, some general tendencies emerge: for example, with some exceptions, smell is poorly coded. The surprise is that, despite the gradual phylogenetic accumulation of the senses, and the imbalances in the neural tissue dedicated to them, no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language.
Journal Article
Pharmacotypes across the genomic landscape of pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia and impact on treatment response
Contemporary chemotherapy for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is risk-adapted based on clinical features, leukemia genomics and minimal residual disease (MRD); however, the pharmacological basis of these prognostic variables remains unclear. Analyzing samples from 805 children with newly diagnosed ALL from three consecutive clinical trials, we determined the ex vivo sensitivity of primary leukemia cells to 18 therapeutic agents across 23 molecular subtypes defined by leukemia genomics. There was wide variability in drug response, with favorable ALL subtypes exhibiting the greatest sensitivity to L-asparaginase and glucocorticoids. Leukemia sensitivity to these two agents was highly associated with MRD although with distinct patterns and only in B cell ALL. We identified six patient clusters based on ALL pharmacotypes, which were associated with event-free survival, even after adjusting for MRD. Pharmacotyping identified a T cell ALL subset with a poor prognosis that was sensitive to targeted agents, pointing to alternative therapeutic strategies. Our study comprehensively described the pharmacological heterogeneity of ALL, highlighting opportunities for further individualizing therapy for this most common childhood cancer.
Pharmacotyping analyses of large cohorts of pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia identify correlations between drug sensitivities and clinical outcomes across different genomic subtypes.
Journal Article