Balthasar Bickel gives plenary at MEDAL conference, Tartu
Balthasar Bickel gave an invited plenary talk on October 9th on "Integrating phylogenetic, typological, and neurobiological perspecitves on language" at the Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics: New Challenges, novel approaches (MEDAL) conference at University of Tartu, Estonia.
A core property of the human language faculty is its intrinsic dynamic. Unlike the communication systems of other great apes, language is subject to relentless change, yielding massive typological diversity in its structure. Phylogenetic methods have revolutionized the way this dynamic can be understood, efficiently separating systematic biases from random fluctuations in linguistic evolution. Yet results are limited because we have only access to linguistic evolution since the Neolithic, a period characterized by unusually high densities and contact between human populations. This makes it unclear whether biases reflect only recent history or properties of language at the level of the entire species over its 300-500 ky history. These issues can be resolved to some extent by convergent evidence from experimentally testable mechanisms that drive biases in observed evolution, such as a preference for a certain structure (e.g. agent-first sentences) over another (e.g. agent-last sentences). Biases scale up to the species level if they are grounded in (neuro)biological mechanisms that fully persist under maximally diverse conditions, in particular if they persist under adverse conditions, where for example current usage frequencies in a language are at odds with the proposed mechanism. In my talk I will review recent work along these lines, highlighting the methodological developments that are needed for fully integrating the phylogenetic-typological perspective on language with the neuroscience of language comprehension and production.