Søren Wichmann
Max Planck Society
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Featured researches published by Søren Wichmann.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | 2016
Damián E. Blasi; Søren Wichmann; Harald Hammarström; Peter F. Stadler; Morten H. Christiansen
Significance The independence between sound and meaning is believed to be a crucial property of language: across languages, sequences of different sounds are used to express similar concepts (e.g., Russian “ptitsa,” Swahili “ndege,” and Japanese “tori” all mean “bird”). However, a careful statistical examination of words from nearly two-thirds of the world’s languages reveals that unrelated languages very often use (or avoid) the same sounds for specific referents. For instance, words for tongue tend to have l or u, “round” often appears with r, and “small” with i. These striking similarities call for a reexamination of the fundamental assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign. It is widely assumed that one of the fundamental properties of spoken language is the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning. Some exceptions in the form of nonarbitrary associations have been documented in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, but these studies only involved small subsets of the 6,000+ languages spoken in the world today. By analyzing word lists covering nearly two-thirds of the world’s languages, we demonstrate that a considerable proportion of 100 basic vocabulary items carry strong associations with specific kinds of human speech sounds, occurring persistently across continents and linguistic lineages (linguistic families or isolates). Prominently among these relations, we find property words (“small” and i, “full” and p or b) and body part terms (“tongue” and l, “nose” and n). The areal and historical distribution of these associations suggests that they often emerge independently rather than being inherited or borrowed. Our results therefore have important implications for the language sciences, given that nonarbitrary associations have been proposed to play a critical role in the emergence of cross-modal mappings, the acquisition of language, and the evolution of our species’ unique communication system.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | 2018
Frank Seifart; Jan Strunk; Swintha Danielsen; Iren Hartmann; Brigitte Pakendorf; Søren Wichmann; Alena Witzlack-Makarevich; Nivja H. De Jong; Balthasar Bickel
Significance When we speak, we unconsciously pronounce some words more slowly than others and sometimes pause. Such slowdown effects provide key evidence for human cognitive processes, reflecting increased planning load in speech production. Here, we study naturalistic speech from linguistically and culturally diverse populations from around the world. We show a robust tendency for slower speech before nouns as compared with verbs. Even though verbs may be more complex than nouns, nouns thus appear to require more planning, probably due to the new information they usually represent. This finding points to strong universals in how humans process language and manage referential information when communicating linguistically. By force of nature, every bit of spoken language is produced at a particular speed. However, this speed is not constant—speakers regularly speed up and slow down. Variation in speech rate is influenced by a complex combination of factors, including the frequency and predictability of words, their information status, and their position within an utterance. Here, we use speech rate as an index of word-planning effort and focus on the time window during which speakers prepare the production of words from the two major lexical classes, nouns and verbs. We show that, when naturalistic speech is sampled from languages all over the world, there is a robust cross-linguistic tendency for slower speech before nouns compared with verbs, both in terms of slower articulation and more pauses. We attribute this slowdown effect to the increased amount of planning that nouns require compared with verbs. Unlike verbs, nouns can typically only be used when they represent new or unexpected information; otherwise, they have to be replaced by pronouns or be omitted. These conditions on noun use appear to outweigh potential advantages stemming from differences in internal complexity between nouns and verbs. Our findings suggest that, beneath the staggering diversity of grammatical structures and cultural settings, there are robust universals of language processing that are intimately tied to how speakers manage referential information when they communicate with one another.
Systematic Biology | 2016
Eric W. Holman; Søren Wichmann
Abstract Since the early 1970s, biologists have debated whether evolution is punctuated by speciation events with bursts of cladogenetic changes, or whether evolution tends to be of a more gradual, anagenetic nature. A similar discussion among linguists has barely begun, but the present results suggest that there is also room for controversy over this issue in linguistics. The only previous study correlated the number of nodes in linguistic phylogenies with branch lengths and found support for punctuated equilibrium. We replicate this result for branch lengths, but find no support for punctuated equilibrium using a different, automated measure of linguistic divergence and a much larger data set. With the automated measure, segments of trees containing more nodes show no greater divergence from an outgroup than segments containing fewer nodes.Since the early 1970s, biologists have debated whether evolution is punctuated by speciation events with bursts of cladogenetic changes, or whether evolution tends to be of a more gradual, anagenetic nature. A similar discussion among linguists has barely begun, but the present results suggest that there is also room for controversy over this issue in linguistics. The only previous study correlated the number of nodes in linguistic phylogenies with branch lengths and found support for punctuated equilibrium. We replicate this result for branch lengths, but find no support for punctuated equilibrium using a different, automated measure of linguistic divergence and a much larger data set. With the automated measure, segments of trees containing more nodes show no greater divergence from an outgroup than segments containing fewer nodes.
Journal of Anthropological Research | 2017
Michael A. Schillaci; Craig Kopris; Søren Wichmann; Genevieve Dewar
This paper employs a quantitative analysis of lexical data to generate a tree describing the historical relationships among Iroquoian languages. An alternative to glottochronology is used to estimate the timing of branching events within the tree. We estimate the homeland of the language family using lexical and geographic distance measures and then compare this estimate with homeland determinations in the literature. Our results suggest that Proto-Iroquoian dates to around 2624 bc, and that the Finger Lakes region of west-central New York is the most likely homeland. The results also revealed a strong relationship between linguistic dissimilarity and geographic distance, likely reflecting the isolating effects of spatial separation on the magnitude of linguistic exchange. The timing of language divergences seems to coincide with important events observable in the archaeological record, including the first evidence for the use of corn in New York and Ontario. The development of important Iroquoian cultural attributes such as the longhouse, matrilocal residence, and the intensification of agriculture all coincide with a period which saw most of the internal language divergences.
Language Dynamics and Change | 2015
Jeff Good; Søren Wichmann
With this issue, we are very pleased to see Language Dynamics and Change (ldc) finish its fifth year of publication. When the journal was launched, our goal was to establish an outlet for high-quality work on diachronic linguistics and connected fields written from both traditional and emerging perspectives. We believe thatwe have been successful in this regard. Already in our inaugural issue, we present, on the one hand, work from a strongly linguistic perspective in Hyman’s (2011) consideration of how proposals for major linguistic macroareas within Africa should (or should not) impact our reconstruction of the Proto-Niger-Congo. And, on the other hand, immediately following, there is Pakendorf et al.’s (2011) interdisciplinary synthesis of work on the linguistic and genetic prehistory of speakers of Bantu languages. Based on the global distribution of the authors who have published in the journal (covering much of Europe, North America, and Australia) and their stage of career (from well-known senior scholars to rising mid-career and junior researchers), there is good evidence that the journal is filling what had previously been an open niche in the linguistics publishing landscape. Its pages have also contained articles focusing on a wide range of language families and groups, such as Uto-Aztecan (Hill, 2011), Alor-Pantar (Robinson and Holton, 2012), Chinese (List et al., 2014), non-Bantu languages of southern Africa (Güldemann and Loughnane, 2012), and Indo-European (Barðdal and Smitherman, 2013), as well as papers covering a diverse set of topics within historical linguistics, from areality (Michael et al., 2014) and borrowing (Seifart, 2015) to cognitive models of language change (Morley, 2012). Importantly, it has also featured papers on the computational and mathematical modelling of language change (e.g., van Trijp, 2013). While many aspects of the way the journal operates are similar to other humanities journals, there are also some features that are more likely to be found in a hard science journal, intended to enhance the speed with which content is published: reviewers are asked to hand in their reports in just three
Archive | 2015
Søren Wichmann
Archive | 2017
Søren Wichmann
Archive | 2015
Søren Wichmann
Diachronica | 2017
Søren Wichmann
Archive | 2016
Michael A. Schillaci; Søren Wichmann