Paper Info
Title
Framing a socio-indexical basis for the emergence and cultural transmission of phonological systems
Abstract
Moulin-Frier, Diard, Schwartz, and Bessière (2015) proffer a conceptual framework and computational modeling architecture for the investigation of the emergence of phonological universals for spoken languages. They validate the framework and architecture by testing to see whether universals such as the prevalence of triangular vowel systems that show adequate dispersion in the F1–F2–F3 space can fall out of simulations of referential communication between social agents, without building principles such as dispersion directly into the model. In this paper, we examine the assumptions underlying the framework, beginning with the assumption that it is such substantive universals that are in need of explanation rather than the rich diversity of phonological systems observed across human cultures and the compositional (prosodic) structure that characterizes signed as well as spoken languages. Also, when emergence is construed at the time-scales of the biological evolution of the species and of the cultural evolution of distinct speech communities, it is the affiliative or affective rather than the referential function that has the greater significance for our understanding of how phonological systems can emerge de novo in ontogeny.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1016/j.wocn.2015.09.004
Journal of Phonetics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Babbling,Origins of language diversification,Compositionality,Phonological acquisition,Language evolution
Indexicality,Principle of compositionality,Babbling,Problem of universals,Communication,Psychology,Vowel,Sociocultural evolution,Cultural transmission in animals,Linguistics,Conceptual framework
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
53
0095-4470
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
22
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Andrew R. Plummer1547.89
Mary E. Beckman237173.24