Caleb D Everett

This chapter surveys research suggesting that languages adapt to external pressures, focusing most heavily on the possibility that some features of sound systems are adaptive. It details a general methodological approach used to explore adaptive effects in this domain, which proceeds by first generating hypotheses from findings in fields like laryngology and orthodontics. These hypotheses are then tested with correlations between non-linguistic data and typological data and potentially supported with other sorts of data including analyses of actual speech and biomechanical modelling. This general method is illustrated here via a discussion of two relevant hypotheses in the literature, one related to labiodental sounds and one related to vocal cord vibration. I rely on several recent papers on these topics, which have advanced this work methodologically, while also offering some illustrative data. Finally, I present some concluding remarks.

The order of acquisition of consonants by children is impacted by both language-specific and species-wide factors. The latter factors also help to motivate the crosslinguistic commonness of some consonants. Here we explore the extent of overlap between crosslinguistic commonness and order of acquisition. We test how well the typological commonness of consonants is predictive of their order of acquisition in English, and vice versa, helping to shed light on the extent to which general cognitive and physical factors are explanatory vis-à-vis the acquisition of specific consonant types. We utilize several different sources to demonstrate that typological frequency and order of acquisition are indeed highly mutually predictive. We rely on acquisition data from English. We demonstrate that the crosslinguistic usage of a consonant is a better predictor of its order of acquisition than the language-specific factors tested.

We describe ongoing efforts to better understand the interaction of spoken languages and their physical environments. We begin by briefly surveying research suggesting that languages evolve in ways that are influenced by the physical characteristics of their environments, however the primary focus is on the converse issue: how speech affects the physical environment. We discuss the speech-based production of airflow and aerosol particles that are buoyant in ambient air, based on some of the results in the literature. Most critically, we demonstrate a novel method used to capture aerosol, airflow, and acoustic data simultaneously. This method captures airflow data via a pneumotachograph and aerosol data via an electrical particle impactor. The data are collected underneath a laminar flow hood while participants breathe pure air, thereby eliminating background aerosol particles and isolating those produced during speech. Given the capabilities of the electrical particle impactor, which has not previously been used to analyze speech-based aerosols, the method allows for the detection of aerosol particles at temporal and physical resolutions exceeding those evident in the literature, even enabling the isolation of the role of individual sound types in the production of aerosols. The aerosols detected via this method range in size from 70 nanometers to 10 micrometers in diameter. Such aerosol particles are capable of hosting airborne pathogens. We discuss how this approach could ultimately yield data that are relevant to airborne disease transmission and offer preliminary results that illustrate such relevance. The method described can help uncover the actual articulatory gestures that generate aerosol emissions, as exemplified here through a discussion focused on plosive aspiration and vocal cord vibration. The results we describe illustrate in new ways the unseen and unheard ways in which spoken languages interact with their physical environments.

A sweeping exploration of the relationship between the language we speak and our perception of such fundamentals of experience as time, space, color, and smells.We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But this isn’t the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity tells us about human culture, overturning conventional wisdom along the way. For instance, though it may seem that everybody refers to time in spatial terms—in English, for example, we speak of time “passing us by”—speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi Kawahib never do. In fact, Tupi Kawahib has no word for “time” at all. And while it has long been understood that languages categorize colors based on those that speakers regularly encounter, evidence suggests that the color words we have at our disposal affect how we discriminate colors themselves: a rose may not appear as rosy by any other name. What’s more, the terms available to us even determine the range of smells we can identify. European languages tend to have just a few abstract odor words, like “floral” or “stinky,” whereas Indigenous languages often have well over a dozen.Why do some cultures talk anthropocentrically about things being to one’s “left” or “right,” while others use geocentric words like “east” and “west”? What is the connection between what we eat and the sounds we make? A Myriad of Tongues answers these and other questions, yielding profound insights into the fundamentals of human communication and experience.

Evidence is reviewed for widespread phonological and phonetic tendencies in contemporary languages. The evidence is based largely on the frequency of sound types in word lists and in phoneme inventories across the world's languages. The data reviewed point to likely tendencies in the languages of the Upper Palaeolithic. These tendencies include the reliance on specific nasal and voiceless stop consonants, the relative dispreference for posterior voiced consonants and the use of peripheral vowels. More tenuous hypotheses related to prehistoric languages are also reviewed. These include the propositions that such languages lacked labiodental consonants and relied more heavily on vowels, when contrasted to many contemporary languages. Such hypotheses suggest speech has adapted to subtle pressures that may in some cases vary across populations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

The sound systems of the world’s languages adapt to biomechanical, aerodynamic and cognitive pressures associated with sound production and discrimination. Such pressures help to yield the greater frequency of some sound types and the reduced frequency of others. In this paper I explore such adaptation, pointing out that sound systems not only adapt to such pressures in ways that are clear from a typological perspective, but that they adapt in more subtle ways that are only now becoming apparent. Furthermore, I survey a host of recent studies suggesting that sound systems likely adapt to some pressures that vary across populations and environments. While the extent of adaptation to such variable pressures is certainly debatable, the mere existence of phonetic/phonological adaptation to pressures that differ across populations is increasingly well supported. The evidence in support of such adaptation ranges from large-scale quantitative data, to biomechanical modeling, to the speech of Freddie Mercury.

Extensive research is available on language acquisition and the acquisition of mathematical skills in early childhood. But more recently, research has turned to the question of the influence of specific language aspects on acquisition of mathematical skills. This anthology combines current findings and theories from various disciplines such as (neuro- )psychology, linguistics, didactics and anthropology. Wie hängen sprachliche und mathematische Entwicklung zusammen? Dieser Frage wird derzeit mit großem Interesse aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven nachgegangen.Dieser Sammelband vereint Erkenntnisse aus Psychologie, Neurowissenschaften, Mathematikdidaktik, (Psycho-)Linguistik und Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung. Der interdisziplinäre Ansatz bietet einen umfassenden Blick auf den aktuellen Forschungsstand, dargestellt von national und international renommierten Forschenden.Das Buch gliedert sich in drei Teile. Der erste Teil "Modelle und Theorien" fasst theoretische Überlegungen zusammen und stellt Strukturen für Forschung und Praxis bereit. Dieser Teil dient dazu, den Grundstein für die anderen Teile sowie für zukünftige Forschung zu legen. Der zweite Teil "Kindergartenalter" sowie der dritte Teil "Grundschulalter" decken empirische Befunde über die Korrelation zwischen Sprache und mathematischem Lernen in der jeweiligen Altersgruppe ab. Ein besonderer Fokus liegt hierbei auf dem Aspekt der Mehrsprachigkeit.Damit bietet dieser Sammelband eine große Bandbreite fachspezifischen Wissens für Bildungswissenschaftler*innen, Lehramtsstudierende, Psycholog*innen und Forschende zur Mehrsprachigkeit.

Abstract We test the hypothesis that a specific anatomical feature, the dental malocclusion associated with reduced dental wear, causes languages to adapt by relying more heavily on labiodental consonants. In contrast to previous work on this topic, we adopt a usage-based approach that directly examines the relative frequency of such labiodental sounds within phonetically transcribed word lists and texts from thousands of languages. Labiodentals are shown to be very infrequent in the languages of hunter gatherers, who tend to have edge-to-edge bites as opposed to the overbite and overjet observed in populations that consume softer diets and rely heavily on eating utensils. This strong tendency is evident after controlling for Galton’s problem via multiple methods including frequentist and Bayesian linear mixed modeling. Additionally, we discuss data from Amazonian hunter gatherers with edge-to-edge bites. The languages of these populations are shown not to use labiodentals frequently, or to have only recently begun doing so. Finally, we analyze the speech of English speakers with varying bite types, demonstrating how the sounds used by individuals reflect the same phenomenon. The diverse findings converge on the same conclusion: speech adapts to anatomical differences within and across populations.