Cover not available
Article published In:
Interaction and Iconicity in the Evolution of Language
Edited by Stefan Hartmann, Michael Pleyer, James Winters and Jordan Zlatev
[Interaction Studies 18:3] 2017
► pp. 330–351

Empirical approaches for investigating the origins of structure in speech

| Vrije Universiteit Brussel | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics | Vrije Universiteit Brussel | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics |
| Vrije Universiteit Brussel | Vrije Universiteit Brussel | Aalto University | Aalto University |
| Vrije Universiteit Brussel | Vrije Universiteit Brussel |
| Vrije Universiteit Brussel | Vrije Universiteit Brussel |

In language evolution research, the use of computational and experimental methods to investigate the emergence of structure in language is exploding. In this review, we look exclusively at work exploring the emergence of structure in speech, on both a categorical level (what drives the emergence of an inventory of individual speech sounds), and a combinatorial level (how these individual speech sounds emerge and are reused as part of larger structures). We show that computational and experimental methods for investigating population-level processes can be effectively used to explore and measure the effects of learning, communication and transmission on the emergence of structure in speech. We also look at work on child language acquisition as a tool for generating and validating hypotheses for the emergence of speech categories. Further, we review the effects of noise, iconicity and production effects.

Keywords: evolution of speech, combinatorial structure, phonetic learning, artificial language experiments
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Emergence of categories in speech
    • 2.1Category emergence at the population level
      • 2.1.1Computational and corpus studies
      • 2.1.2Experimental studies
      • 2.1.3Summary
    • 2.2Category learning in individuals
      • 2.2.1Statistical learning of speech sound categories
      • 2.2.2Effects of speech production of category acquisition
  • 3.The Emergence of combinatorial structure
    • 3.1Effects of learnability in transmission
    • 3.2Effects of physical constraints
    • 3.3Effects of noise
    • 3.4Effects of iconicity and conventionalisation
    • 3.5Measuring structure
    • 3.6Summary
  • 4.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18.3.03lit
References
Anthony, J. L., & Francis, D. J.
(2005) Development of phonological awareness. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(5): 255–259. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blevins, J.
(2004) Evolutionary phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carr, J. W., Smith, K., Cornish, H., & Kirby, S.
(2016) The cultural evolution of structured languages in an open‐ended, continuous world. Cognitive Science. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carré, R.
(1996) Prediction of vowel systems using a deductive approach. In H. T. Bunnell & W. Idsardi (Eds.), Proceedings of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP ’96 (pp. 1593–1597). IEEE. DOI logo
Caselli, N., Ergin, R., Jackendoff, R., & Cohen-Goldberg, A.
(2014) The emergence of phonological structure in central taurus sign language. From Sound to Gesture , Padua, Italy.
de Boer, B.
(2000) Emergence of sound systems through self-organisation. In C. Knight, M. Studdert- Kennedy, & J. R. Hurford (Eds.), The evolutionary emergence of language: Social function and the origins of linguistic form (pp. 177–198). New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Boer, B., & Kuhl, P. K.
(2003) Investigating the role of infant-directed speech with a computer model. Acoustics Research Letters Online: ARLO, 41, 129–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Boer, B., Sandler, W., & Kirby, S.
(2012) New perspectives on duality of patterning: Introduction to the special issue. Language and Cognition, 4(4), 251–259. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Boer, B., & Verhoef, T.
(2012) Language dynamics in structured form and meaning spaces. Advances in Complex Systems. A Multidisciplinary Journal, 15(3), 1150021–1–1150021–20.Google Scholar
Del Giudice, A.
(2012) The emergence of duality of patterning through iterated learning: Precursors to phonology in a visual lexicon. Language and Cognition, 4(4), 381–418. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eryılmaz, K., & Little, H.
(2016) Using leap motion to investigate the emergence of structure in speech and language. Behavioral Research Methods. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feldman, N. H., Griffiths, T. L., & Morgan, J. L.
(2009) Learning phonetic categories by learning a lexicon. In N. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st annual conference of the cognitive science society (CogSci 2009) (pp. 2208–2213).
Feldman, N. H., Myers, E. B., White, K. S., Griffiths, T. L., & Morgan, J. L.
(2013) Word-level information influences phonetic learning in adults and infants. Cognition, 127(3), 427–438. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fitch, W. T.
(2000) The evolution of speech: A comparative review. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(7), 258–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
François, C., Cunillera, T., Garcia, E., Laine, M., & Rodriguez-Fornells, A.
(2016) Neurophysiological evidence for the interplay of speech segmentation and word-referent mapping during novel word learning. Neuropsychologia.Google Scholar
Galantucci, B.
(2005) An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems. Cognitive Science, 29(5), 737–767. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Galantucci, B., Kroos, C., & Rhodes, T.
(2010) The effects of rapidity of fading on communication systems. Interaction Studies, 11(1), 100–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, S., & McNeill, D.
(1999) The role of gesture and mimetic representation in making language the province of speech. In M. C. Corballis & S. Lea (Eds.), Evolution of the Hominid Mind (pp. 155–172). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, M. H., King, A. P., & West, M. J.
(2003) Social interaction shapes babbling: Testing parallels between birdsong and speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100(13), 8030–8035. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldstein, M. H., & Schwade, J. A.
(2008) Social feedback to infants’ babbling facilitates rapid phonological learning. Psychological Science, 19(5), 515–523. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gros-Louis, J., West, M. J., Goldstein, M. H., & King, A. P.
(2006) Mothers provide differential feedback to infants’ prelinguistic sounds. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 30(6), 509–516. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hockett, C. F.
(1960) The origin of speech. Scientific American, 2031, 88–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Howard, I. S., & Messum, P.
(2011) Modeling the development of pronunciation in infant speech acquisition. Motor Control, 15(1), 85–117. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, S. S.
(2009) The development of imitation in infancy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 364(1528), 2325–2335. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keshet, J., Shalev-Shwartz, S., Singer, Y., & Chazan, D.
(2005) Phoneme alignment based on discriminative learning. In Proceedings of Interspeech 20051 (pp. 2961–2964).
Kirby, J., & Sonderegger, M.
(2015) Bias and population structure in the actuation of sound change. arXiv:1507.04420 [physics].
Kirby, S.
(2002b) Natural language from artificial life. Artificial Life, 8(2), 185–215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirby, S., Cornish, H., & Smith, K.
(2008) Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(31), 10681–10686. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kirby, S., Tamariz, M., Cornish, H., & Smith, K.
(2015) Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure. Cognition, 1411, 87–102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kokkinaki, T., & Kugiumutzakis, G.
(2000) Basic aspects of vocal imitation in infant-parent interaction during the first 6 months. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 18(3), 173–187. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kokkinaki, T., & Vitalaki, E.
(2013) Comparing spontaneous imitation in grandmother-infant and mother-infant interaction: A three generation familial study. International Journal of Aging & Human Development, 77(2), 77–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, C.-Y., & Glass, J.
(2012) A nonparametric Bayesian approach to acoustic model discovery. In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Long Papers (Vol. 11, pp. 40–49). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Liljencrants, J., & Lindblom, B.
(1972) Numerical simulation of vowel quality systems: The role of perceptual contrast. Language, 48(4), 839–862. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindblom, B., Macneilage, P., & Studdert-Kennedy, M.
(1984) Self-organizing processes and the explanation of phonological universals. In B. Butterworth, B. Comrie, & Ö. Dahl (Eds.), Explanations for language universals (pp. 181–204). The Hague: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Little, H., & de Boer, B.
(2014) The effect of size of articulation space on the emergence of combinatorial structure. In A. Cartmill Erica, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th international conference (EVOLANGX) (pp. 479–481). Singapore: World Scientific. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Little, H., & Eryılmaz, K.
(2016) Using leap motion to investigate the emergence of structure in speech and language. Behaviour Research Methods. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Little, H., Eryılmaz, K., & de Boer, B.
(2017) Signal dimensionality and the emergence of combinatorial structure. Cognition 1681, 1–15.
(2015) Linguistic modality affects the creation of structure and iconicity in signals. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), The 37th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 1392–1398). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
(2016) Differing Signal-meaning Dimensionalities Facilitates The Emergence Of Structure. In S. G. Roberts, C. Cuskley, L. McCrohon, L. Barceló-Coblijn, O. Feher, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANGX1) (pp. 182–190).
Majorano, M., Vihman, M. M., & DePaolis, R. A.
(2014) The relationship between infants’ production experience and their processing of speech. Language Learning and Development, 10(2), 179–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, A., Peperkamp, S., & Dupoux, E.
(2013) Learning phonemes with a proto-lexicon. Cognitive Science, 37(1), 103–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Masur, E., & Rodemaker, J. E.
(1999) Mothers’ and infants' spontaneous vocal, verbal, and action imitation during the second year. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 45(3), 392–412.Google Scholar
Matthews, C.
(2009) The emergence of categorization: Language transmission in an Iterated Learning Model using a continuous meaning space (MSc Thesis). University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
McDonough, J., Ladefoged, P., & George, H.
(1992) Navajo vowels and universal phonetic tendencies. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 92(4), 2416. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mitterer, H., Scharenborg, O., & McQueen, J. M.
(2013) Phonological abstraction without phonemes in speech perception. Cognition, 129(2), 356–361. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miura, K., Katsushi, M., Yuichiro, Y., & Minoru, A.
(2008) Realizing being imitated: Vowel mapping with clearer articulation. In 2008 7th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (pp. 262–267). DOI logo
Miura, K., Yoshikawa, Y., & Asada, M.
(2007) Unconscious anchoring in maternal imitation that helps find the correspondence of a caregiver’s vowel categories. Advanced Robotics: The International Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, 21(13), 1583–1600. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oudeyer, P. Y.
(2005) How phonological structures can be culturally selected for learnability. Adaptive Behavior, 13(4), 269–280. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pawlby, S. J.
(1977) Imitative interaction. In H. Schaffer (Ed.), Studies in mother-infant interaction (pp. 203–224). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Rasilo, H., & Räsänen, O.
(2017) An online model for vowel imitation learning. Speech Communication, 861, 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reinisch, E., Wozny, D. R., Mitterer, H., & Holt, L. L.
(2014) Phonetic category recalibration: What are the categories? Journal of Phonetics, 451, 91–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Räsänen, O.
(2012) Computational modeling of phonetic and lexical learning in early language acquisition: Existing models and future directions. Speech Communication, 54(9), 975–997. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Räsänen, O., & Rasilo, H.
(2015) A joint model of word segmentation and meaning acquisition through cross-situational learning. Psychological Review, 122(4), 792–829. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roberts, G., & Galantucci, B.
(2012) The emergence of duality of patterning: Insights from the laboratory. Language and Cognition, 4(4), 297–318. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roberts, G., Lewandowski, J., & Galantucci, B.
(2015) How communication changes when we cannot mime the world: Experimental evidence for the effect of iconicity on combinatoriality. Cognition, 1411, 52–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sachs, J., Bard, B., & Johnson, M. L.
(1981) Language learning with restricted input: Case studies of two hearing children of deaf parents. Applied Psycholinguistics, 2(1), 33–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saffran, J. R.
(2003) Statistical language learning mechanisms and constraints. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(4), 110–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sandler, W., Aronoff, M., Meir, I., & Padden, C.
(2011) The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 29(2), 503–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scharenborg, O., Wan, V., & Ernestus, M.
(2010) Unsupervised speech segmentation: An analysis of the hypothesized phone boundaries. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127(2), 1084–1095. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shannon, C. E.
(2001) A mathematical theory of communication. ACM Sigmobile Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 5(1), 3–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silvey, C., Kirby, S., & Smith, K.
(2013) Communication leads to the emergence of sub-optimal category structures. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1312–1317). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Silvey, C., Flaherty, M., Goldin-Meadow, S., Kirby, S., & Smith, K.
(2016) Communication without a language model inhibits the emergence of systematic structure. In S. G. Roberts, C. Cuskley, L. McCrohon, L. Barceló-Coblijn, O. Feher, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANGXI) . DOI logo
Smith, A., & Zelaznik, H. N.
(2004) Development of functional synergies for speech motor coordination in childhood and adolescence. Developmental Psychobiology, 45(1), 22–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swingley, D.
(2009) Contributions of infant word learning to language development. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 364(1536), 3617–3632. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tardif, T., Fletcher, P., Liang, W., Zhang, Z., Kaciroti, N., & Marchman, V. A.
(2008) Baby’s first 10 words. Developmental Psychology, 44(4), 929–938. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teinonen, T., Aslin, R. N., Alku, P., & Csibra, G.
(2008) Visual speech contributes to phonetic learning in 6-month-old infants. Cognition, 108(3), 850–855. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
ten Bosch, L.
(1995) Lexically-Based vowel dispersion: A case study for Dutch. Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences , University of Amsterdam, 191, 39–50.
ter Schure, S. M. M., Junge, C. M. M., & Boersma, P. P. G.
(2016) Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence. Infant Behavior & Development, 431, 44–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thiessen, E. D.
(2007) The effect of distributional information on children’s use of phonemic contrasts. Journal of Memory and Language, 56(1), 16–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2011) When variability matters more than meaning: The effect of lexical forms on use of phonemic contrasts. Developmental Psychology, 47(5), 1448–1458. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tria, F., Galantucci, B., & Loreto, V.
(2012) Naming a structured world: A cultural route to duality of patterning. PloS One, 7(6), e37744. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vallabha, G. K., McClelland, J. L., Pons, F., Werker, J. F., & Amano, S.
(2007) Unsupervised learning of vowel categories from infant-directed speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(33), 13273–13278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van der Ham, S., & de Boer, B.
(2015) Cognitive bias for learning speech sounds from a continuous signal space seems nonlinguistic. I-Perception, 6(5), 2041669515593019. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Varadarajan, B., Khundapur, S., & Dupoux, E.
(2008) Unsupervised learning of acoustic sub-word units. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technologies Short Papers - HLT ’08 (pp. 165–168). Ohio, USA. DOI logo
Vaux, B., & Samuels, B.
(2015) Explaining vowel systems: dispersion theory vs natural selection. The Linguistic Review, 32(3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhoef, T.
(2012) The origins of duality of patterning in artificial whistled languages. Language and Cognition, 4(4), 357–380. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhoef, T., Kirby, S., & de Boer, B.
(2014) Emergence of combinatorial structure and economy through iterated learning with continuous acoustic signals. Journal of Phonetics, 43(1), 57–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2015) Iconicity and the Emergence of Combinatorial Structure in Language. Cognitive Science. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walsh, B., Smith, A., & Weber-Fox, C.
(2006) Short-term plasticity in children’s speech motor systems. Developmental Psychobiology, 48(8), 660–674. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wedel, A., Kaplan, A., & Jackson, S.
(2013) High functional load inhibits phonological contrast loss: A corpus study. Cognition, 128(2), 179–186. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yeung, H. H., & Werker, J. F.
(2009) Learning words’ sounds before learning how words sound: 9-month-olds use distinct objects as cues to categorize speech information. Cognition, 113(2), 234–243. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zuidema, W., & Boer, B. D.
(2009) The evolution of combinatorial phonology. Journal of Phonetics, 37(2), 125–144 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Goldrick, Matthew & Jennifer Cole
2023. Advancement of phonetics in the 21st century: Exemplar models of speech production. Journal of Phonetics 99 ► pp. 101254 ff. DOI logo
Pleyer, Michael & Stefan Hartmann
2024. Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution, DOI logo
Zuidema, Willem & Bart de Boer
2018. The evolution of combinatorial structure in language. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 21 ► pp. 138 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.