Detecting regular sound changes in linguistics as events of concerted evolution.
Curr Biol
; 25(1): 1-9, 2015 Jan 05.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-25532895
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND:
Concerted evolution is normally used to describe parallel changes at different sites in a genome, but it is also observed in languages where a specific phoneme changes to the same other phoneme in many words in the lexicona phenomenon known as regular sound change. We develop a general statistical model that can detect concerted changes in aligned sequence data and apply it to study regular sound changes in the Turkic language family.RESULTS:
Linguistic evolution, unlike the genetic substitutional process, is dominated by events of concerted evolutionary change. Our model identified more than 70 historical events of regular sound change that occurred throughout the evolution of the Turkic language family, while simultaneously inferring a dated phylogenetic tree. Including regular sound changes yielded an approximately 4-fold improvement in the characterization of linguistic change over a simpler model of sporadic change, improved phylogenetic inference, and returned more reliable and plausible dates for events on the phylogenies. The historical timings of the concerted changes closely follow a Poisson process model, and the sound transition networks derived from our model mirror linguistic expectations.CONCLUSIONS:
We demonstrate that a model with no prior knowledge of complex concerted or regular changes can nevertheless infer the historical timings and genealogical placements of events of concerted change from the signals left in contemporary data. Our model can be applied wherever discrete elementssuch as genes, words, cultural trends, technologies, or morphological traitscan change in parallel within an organism or other evolving group.
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Fonética
/
Evolución Cultural
Tipo de estudio:
Prognostic_studies
/
Risk_factors_studies
Límite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Curr Biol
Asunto de la revista:
BIOLOGIA
Año:
2015
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Estados Unidos