The rise and fall of rationality in language.

The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as "determine" and "conclusion," rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as "feel" and "believe" declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as "I"/"we" and "he"/"they." Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest. All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

Language evolution and complexity considerations: The no half-Merge fallacy.

Recently, prominent theoretical linguists have argued for an explicit scenario for the evolution of the human language capacity on the basis of its computational properties. Concretely, the simplicity of a minimalist formulation of the operation Merge, which allows humans to recursively compute hierarchical relations in language, has been used to promote a sudden-emergence, single-mutation scenario. In support of this view, Merge is said to be either fully present or fully absent: one cannot have half-Merge. On this basis, it is inferred that the emergence of our fully fledged language capacity had to be sudden. Thus, proponents of this view draw a parallelism between the formal complexity of the operation at the computational level and the number of evolutionary steps it must imply. Here, we examine this argument in detail and show that the jump from the atomicity of Merge to a single-mutation scenario is not valid and therefore cannot be used as justification for a theory of language evolution along those lines.

Using computerized text analysis to examine associations between linguistic features and clients' distress during psychotherapy.

Raw linguistic data within psychotherapy sessions may provide important information about clients' progress and well-being. In the current study, computerized text analytic techniques were applied to examine whether linguistic features were associated with clients' experiences of distress within and between clients and whether changes in linguistic features were associated with changes in treatment outcome. Transcripts of 729 psychotherapy sessions from 58 clients treated by 52 therapists were analyzed. Prior to each session, clients reported their distress level. Linguistic features were extracted automatically by using natural language parser for first-person singular identification and using positive and negative emotion words lexicon. The association between linguistic features and levels of distress was examined using multilevel models. At the within-client level, fewer first-person singular words, fewer negative emotional words and more positive emotional words were associated with lower distress in the same session; and fewer negative emotion words were associated with lower next session distress (rather small f2 effect sizes = 0.011 < f2 < 0.022). At the between-client level, only first session use of positive emotion words was associated with first session distress (ηp2 effect size = 0.08). A drop in the use of first-person singular words was associated with improved outcome from pre- to posttreatment (small ηp2 effect size = 0.05). The findings provide preliminary support for the association between clients' linguistic features and their fluctuating experience of distress. They point to the potential value of computerized linguistic measures to track therapeutic outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Subtle Linguistic Cues Increase Girls' Engagement in Science.

The roots of gender disparities in science achievement take hold in early childhood. The present studies aimed to identify a modifiable feature of young children's environments that could be targeted to reduce gender differences in science behavior among young children. Four experimental studies with children ( N = 501) revealed that describing science in terms of actions ("Let's do science! Doing science means exploring the world!") instead of identities ("Let's be scientists! Scientists explore the world!") increased girls' subsequent persistence in new science games designed to illustrate the scientific method. These studies thus identified subtle but powerful linguistic cues that could be targeted to help reduce gender disparities in science engagement in early childhood.

Environmental productivity predicts migration, demographic, and linguistic patterns in prehistoric California.

Global patterns of ethnolinguistic diversity vary tremendously. Some regions show very little variation even across vast expanses, whereas others exhibit dense mosaics of different languages spoken alongside one another. Compared with the rest of Native North America, prehistoric California exemplified the latter. Decades of linguistic, genetic, and archaeological research have produced detailed accounts of the migrations that aggregated to build California's diverse ethnolinguistic mosaic, but there have been few have attempts to explain the process underpinning these migrations and why such a mosaic did not develop elsewhere. Here we show that environmental productivity predicts both the order of migration events and the population density recorded at contact. The earliest colonizers occupied the most suitable habitats along the coast, whereas subsequent Mid-Late Holocene migrants settled in more marginal habitats. Other Late Holocene patterns diverge from this trend, reflecting altered dynamics linked to food storage and increased sedentism. Through repeated migration events, incoming populations replaced resident populations occurring at lower densities in lower-productivity habitats, thereby resulting in the fragmentation of earlier groups and the development of one of the most diverse ethnolinguistic patterns in the Americas. Such a process may account for the distribution of ethnolinguistic diversity worldwide.

Co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity in biodiversity hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas.

As the world grows less biologically diverse, it is becoming less linguistically and culturally diverse as well. Biologists estimate annual loss of species at 1,000 times or more greater than historic rates, and linguists predict that 50-90% of the world's languages will disappear by the end of this century. Prior studies indicate similarities in the geographic arrangement of biological and linguistic diversity, although conclusions have often been constrained by use of data with limited spatial precision. Here we use greatly improved datasets to explore the co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity in regions containing many of the Earth's remaining species: biodiversity hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas. Results indicate that these regions often contain considerable linguistic diversity, accounting for 70% of all languages on Earth. Moreover, the languages involved are frequently unique (endemic) to particular regions, with many facing extinction. Likely reasons for co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity are complex and appear to vary among localities, although strong geographic concordance between biological and linguistic diversity in many areas argues for some form of functional connection. Languages in high biodiversity regions also often co-occur with one or more specific conservation priorities, here defined as endangered species and protected areas, marking particular localities important for maintaining both forms of diversity. The results reported in this article provide a starting point for focused research exploring the relationship between biological and linguistic-cultural diversity, and for developing integrated strategies designed to conserve species and languages in regions rich in both.

Clinical linguistics: conversational reflections.

This is a report of the main points I made in an informal "conversation" with Paul Fletcher and the audience at the 14th ICPLA conference in Cork. The observations arose randomly, as part of an unstructured 1-h Q&A, so they do not provide a systematic account of the subject, but simply reflect the issues which were raised by the conference participants during that time.

Relationship between the linguistic environments and early bilingual language development of hearing children in deaf-parented families.

We explored variation in the linguistic environments of hearing children of Deaf parents and how it was associated with their early bilingual language development. For that purpose we followed up the children's productive vocabulary (measured with the MCDI; MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory) and syntactic complexity (measured with the MLU10; mean length of the 10 longest utterances the child produced during videorecorded play sessions) in both Finnish Sign Language and spoken Finnish between the ages of 12 and 30 months. Additionally, we developed new methodology for describing the linguistic environments of the children (N = 10). Large variation was uncovered in both the amount and type of language input and language acquisition among the children. Language exposure and increases in productive vocabulary and syntactic complexity were interconnected. Language acquisition was found to be more dependent on the amount of exposure in sign language than in spoken language. This was judged to be related to the status of sign language as a minority language. The results are discussed in terms of parents' language choices, family dynamics in Deaf-parented families and optimal conditions for bilingual development.

How hierarchical is language use?

It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that hierarchical structure should not be invoked too hastily. Indeed, recent neurophysiological, behavioural and computational studies show that sequential sentence structure has considerable explanatory power and that hierarchical processing is often not involved. In this paper, we review evidence from the recent literature supporting the hypothesis that sequential structure may be fundamental to the comprehension, production and acquisition of human language. Moreover, we provide a preliminary sketch outlining a non-hierarchical model of language use and discuss its implications and testable predictions. If linguistic phenomena can be explained by sequential rather than hierarchical structure, this will have considerable impact in a wide range of fields, such as linguistics, ethology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology and computer science.

Medical discourse in pathological anatomy.

The paper is devoted to the peculiarities of medical discourse in pathological anatomy as coherent speech and as a linguistic correlate of medical practice taking into account the analysis of its strategies and tactics. The purpose of the paper is to provide a multifaceted analysis of the speech strategies and tactics of pathological anatomy discourse and ways of their implementation. The main strategies of medical discourse in pathological anatomy are an anticipating strategy, a diagnosing strategy and an explaining one. The supporting strategies are pragmatic, conversational and a rhetorical one. The pragmatic strategy is implemented through contact establishing tactics, the conversational one - with the help of control tactics, the rhetorical one - with the help of attention correction tactics. The above mentioned tactics and strategies are used in the distinguishing of major, closely interrelated strategies: "the contact strategy" (to establish contact with a patient's relatives - phatic replicas of greeting and addressing) and "the strategy of explanation" (used in the practice of a pathologist for a detailed explanation of the reasons of a patient's death). The ethic aspect of speech conduct of a doctor-pathologist is analyzed.

Visual form of ASL verb signs predicts non-signer judgment of transitivity.

Longstanding cross-linguistic work on event representations in spoken languages have argued for a robust mapping between an event's underlying representation and its syntactic encoding, such that-for example-the agent of an event is most frequently mapped to subject position. In the same vein, sign languages have long been claimed to construct signs that visually represent their meaning, i.e., signs that are iconic. Experimental research on linguistic parameters such as plurality and aspect has recently shown some of them to be visually universal in sign, i.e. recognized by non-signers as well as signers, and have identified specific visual cues that achieve this mapping. However, little is known about what makes action representations in sign language iconic, or whether and how the mapping of underlying event representations to syntactic encoding is visually apparent in the form of a verb sign. To this end, we asked what visual cues non-signers may use in evaluating transitivity (i.e., the number of entities involved in an action). To do this, we correlated non-signer judgments about transitivity of verb signs from American Sign Language (ASL) with phonological characteristics of these signs. We found that non-signers did not accurately guess the transitivity of the signs, but that non-signer transitivity judgments can nevertheless be predicted from the signs' visual characteristics. Further, non-signers cue in on just those features that code event representations across sign languages, despite interpreting them differently. This suggests the existence of visual biases that underlie detection of linguistic categories, such as transitivity, which may uncouple from underlying conceptual representations over time in mature sign languages due to lexicalization processes.

Understanding the spatial dimension of natural language by measuring the spatial semantic similarity of words through a scalable geospatial context window.

Measuring the semantic similarity between words is important for natural language processing tasks. The traditional models of semantic similarity perform well in most cases, but when dealing with words that involve geographical context, spatial semantics of implied spatial information are rarely preserved. Geographic information retrieval (GIR) methods have focused on this issue; however, they sometimes fail to solve the problem because the spatial and textual similarities of words are considered and calculated separately. In this paper, from the perspective of spatial context, we consider the two parts as a whole-spatial context semantics, and we propose a method that measures spatial semantic similarity using a sliding geospatial context window for geo-tagged words. The proposed method was first validated with a set of simulated data and then applied to a real-world dataset from Flickr. As a result, a spatial semantic similarity model at different scales is presented. We believe this model is a necessary supplement for traditional textual-language semantic analyses of words obtained by word-embedding technologies. This study has the potential to improve the quality of recommendation systems by considering relevant spatial context semantics, and benefits linguistic semantic research by emphasising the spatial cognition among words.

Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss!: A two-parameter characterization of stretchable words and the dynamics of mistypings and misspellings.

Stretched words like 'heellllp' or 'heyyyyy' are a regular feature of spoken language, often used to emphasize or exaggerate the underlying meaning of the root word. While stretched words are rarely found in formal written language and dictionaries, they are prevalent within social media. In this paper, we examine the frequency distributions of 'stretchable words' found in roughly 100 billion tweets authored over an 8 year period. We introduce two central parameters, 'balance' and 'stretch', that capture their main characteristics, and explore their dynamics by creating visual tools we call 'balance plots' and 'spelling trees'. We discuss how the tools and methods we develop here could be used to study the statistical patterns of mistypings and misspellings and be used as a basis for other linguistic research involving stretchable words, along with the potential applications in augmenting dictionaries, improving language processing, and in any area where sequence construction matters, such as genetics.

Evolutionary disruption of S&P 500 trading concentration: An intriguing tale of a financial innovation.

The novel finding of Balakrishnan, Miller & Shankar (2008) that investors, overwhelmed by the plethora of stock investment offerings, limit their analysis and daily choices to only a small subset of stocks (i.e., herding behavior) now seems to be common wisdom (Iosebashvili, 2019). We investigate whether the introduction of an innovation in financial products designed to allow investors to trade the entire product bundle of S&P 500 stocks, namely S&P 500 index funds, altered "herding behavior" by creating a new class of index investors. We model the distribution of daily trading concentration as a power law function and examine changes over the last six decades. Intriguingly, we discover a unique pattern in the trading concentration distribution that exhibits two distinct trends. For the period 1960-75, the trading concentration of the S&P 500 stocks tracks the increasing trend for the entire market, i.e., the unevenness in trading has steadily increased. However, after the introduction of S&P 500 index funds in 1975, concentration of trading in the S&P 500 stocks has steadily decreased, i.e., trading distribution has become more even across all 500 stocks, contrary to the current belief of equity analysts. This is also in sharp contrast to the case of U.S. stocks that are not in the S&P 500 index where trading concentration has steadily increased. We further corroborate the uniqueness of the inverted V-shape by a counterfactual investigation of the trading concentration patterns for other sets of 500 stock portfolios. This uniquely distinctive trading concentration pattern for S&P 500 stocks appears to be driven by the increasing dominance of bundle trading by index investors.

Decoding the biology of language and its implications in language acquisition.

Associating human genetic makeup with the faculty of language has long been a goal for biolinguistics. This stimulated the idea that language is attributed to genes and language disabilities are caused by genetic mutations. However, application of genetic knowledge on language intervention is still a gap in the existing literature. In an effort to bridge this gap, this article presents an account of genetic and neural associations of language and synthesizes the genetic, neural, epigenetic and environmental facets involved in language. In addition to describing the association of genes with language, the neural and epigenetic aspects of language are also explored. Further, the environmental aspects of language such as language input, emotion and cognition are also traced back to gene expressions. Therefore, effective language intervention for language learning difficulties must offer genetics-informed solutions, both linguistic and medical.

Bilingualism and Dementia: Cognitive Reserve to Linguistic Competency.

Despite the large number of elderly bilinguals at risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia worldwide, significant questions remain about the relationship between speaking more than one language and later cognitive decline. Bilingualism may impact on cognitive and neural reserve, time of onset of dementia symptoms and neuropathology, and linguistic competency in dementia. This review indicates increased cognitive reserve from executive (monitoring, selecting, inhibiting) control of two languages and increased neural reserve involving left frontal and related areas for language control. Many, but not all, studies indicate a delay in dementia symptom onset but worse hippocampal and mesiotemporal atrophy among bilinguals versus monolinguals with AD. In contrast, bilinguals do worse on language measures, and bilinguals with AD or dementia have difficulty maintaining and monitoring their second language. Together, these studies suggest that early-acquired and proficient bilingualism increases reserve through frontal-predominant executive control, and these executive abilities compensate for early dementia symptoms, delaying their onset but not the neuropathology of their disease. Finally, as executive control decreases further with advancing dementia, there is increasing difficulty inhibiting the dominant first language and staying in the second language. These conclusions must be interpreted with caution, given the problems inherent in this type of research; however, they do recommend more work on the pre-dementia neuroprotective effects and the dementia-related language impairments of bilingualism.

Neurophysiological, linguistic, and cognitive predictors of children's ability to perceive speech in noise.

Hearing in noisy environments is a complicated task that engages attention, memory, linguistic knowledge, and precise auditory-neurophysiological processing of sound. Accumulating evidence in school-aged children and adults suggests these mechanisms vary with the task's demands. For instance, co-located speech and noise demands a large cognitive load and recruits working memory, while spatially separating speech and noise diminishes this load and draws on alternative skills. Past research has focused on one or two mechanisms underlying speech-in-noise perception in isolation; few studies have considered multiple factors in tandem, or how they interact during critical developmental years. This project sought to test complementary hypotheses involving neurophysiological, cognitive, and linguistic processes supporting speech-in-noise perception in young children under different masking conditions (co-located, spatially separated). Structural equation modeling was used to identify latent constructs and examine their contributions as predictors. Results reveal cognitive and language skills operate as a single factor supporting speech-in-noise perception under different masking conditions. While neural coding of the F0 supports perception in both co-located and spatially separated conditions, neural timing predicts perception of spatially separated listening exclusively. Together, these results suggest co-located and spatially separated speech-in-noise perception draw on similar cognitive/linguistic skills, but distinct neural factors, in early childhood.

Adult age differences in the benefit of syntactic and semantic constraints for sentence processing.

Verbal working memory-intensive sentence processing declines with age. This might reflect older adults' difficulties with reducing the memory load by grouping single words into multiword chunks. Here we used a serial order task emphasizing syntactic and semantic relations. We evaluated the extent to which older compared with younger adults may differentially use linguistic constraints during sentence processing to cope with verbal working memory limitations. Probing syntactic-semantic interactions, age differences were hypothesized to be confined to the use of syntactic constraints and to be accompanied by an increased reliance on semantic information. Two experiments varying in verbal working memory demands were conducted: the sequence length was increased from eight items in Experiment 1 to 11 items in Experiment 2. We found the use of syntactic constraints to be compromised with aging, while the benefit of semantic information for sentence processing was comparable across age groups. Hence, we suggest that semantic information processing may become relatively more important for successful sentence processing with advancing adult age, possibly inducing a syntactic-to-semantic-processing strategy shift. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).