ArticleFrontiers in psychology2018
Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contact and complexity in English varieties: The influence of speaker numbers on syntheticity and grammaticity.PloS one · 2026Article
- When the City Speaks: How Urban Form Shapes the Cultural Transmission of Spatial Conceptualization.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Assessing the Role of Socio-Demographic Triggers on Kolmogorov-Based Complexity in Spoken English Varieties.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Editorial: The adaptive value of languages: non-linguistic causes of language diversity, volume II.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Investigating environmental effects on phonology using diachronic models.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
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- Current research in phonological typology.Linguistic typology · 2023Article
- Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Review
- Foggy connections, cloudy frontiers: On the (non-)adaptation of lexical structures.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The sounds of prehistoric speech.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The geography and development of language isolates.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond.PloS one · 2021Article
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Abstract
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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