ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Water limitation modifies vocal performance in California mice: implications for acoustic communication under environmental stress.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2026Article
- An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Psychometric methods and signal detection theory uncover subtle differences in the perception of tone contrasts in speakers of Kam (Dong).Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Ecological-Linguistic Overlap: The Spatial Congruence Between Giant Panda (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Cultural transmission of attitudes and behaviours from parents, peers and grandparents.PloS one · 2026Article
- The cognitive science of language diversity: achievements and challenges.Cognitive processing · 2025Review
- Global warming risks dehydrating and inflaming human airways.Communications earth & environment · 2025Article
- Genetic and linguistic comparisons reveal complex sex-biased transmission of language features.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A revised digital edition of Wurm & Hattori's Language Atlas of the Pacific Area.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Review
- Investigating environmental effects on phonology using diachronic models.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Editorial: The adaptive value of languages: non-linguistic causes of language diversity, volume II.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- Current research in phonological typology.Linguistic typology · 2023Article
- Phylogenetic insight into the origin of tones.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound structure of languages: challenges and solutions.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Ultraviolet light affects the color vocabulary: evidence from 834 languages.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Aerosols, airflow, and more: examining the interaction of speech and the physical environment.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 from two 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.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.