Related papers: Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics
The concept of a temporal phylogenetic network is a mathematical model of evolution of a family of natural languages. It takes into account the fact that languages can trade their characteristics with each other when linguistic communities…
Bayesian inference is now a leading technique for reconstructing phylogenetic trees from aligned sequence data. In this short note, we formally show that the maximum posterior tree topology provides a statistically consistent estimate of a…
Phylogenetic networks extend phylogenetic trees to allow for modeling reticulate evolutionary processes such as hybridization. They take the shape of a rooted, directed, acyclic graph, and when parameterized with evolutionary parameters,…
We present a method of finding and analyzing shifts in grammatical relations found in diachronic corpora. Inspired by the econometric technique of measuring return and volatility instead of relative frequencies, we propose them as a way to…
The statistical methods derived and described in this thesis provide new ways to elucidate the structural properties of text and other symbolic sequences. Generically, these methods allow detection of a difference in the frequency of a…
When comparing speech sounds across languages, scholars often make use of feature representations of individual sounds in order to determine fine-grained sound similarities. Although binary feature systems for large numbers of speech sounds…
By providing a framework of accounting for the shared ancestry inherent to all life, phylogenetics is becoming the statistical foundation of biology. The importance of model choice continues to grow as phylogenetic models continue to…
As an alternative to parsimony analyses, stochastic models have been proposed (Lewis, 2001), (Nylander, et al., 2004) for morphological characters, so that maximum likelihood or Bayesian analyses may be used for phylogenetic inference. A…
Many biological characteristics of evolutionary interest are not scalar variables but continuous functions. Here we use phylogenetic Gaussian process regression to model the evolution of simulated function-valued traits. Given…
In molecular phylogeny, relationships among organisms are reconstructed using DNA or protein sequences and are displayed as trees. A linear increase in the number of sequences results in an exponential increase of possible trees. Thus,…
A foundational assumption in linguistics holds that the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary. Accumulating evidence from sound symbolism challenges this view, yet no study has systematically mapped the…
Passive acoustic monitoring offers a scalable, non-invasive method for tracking global biodiversity and anthropogenic impacts on species. Although deep learning has become a vital tool for processing this data, current models are…
Traditional approaches for understanding phonological learning have predominantly relied on curated text data. Although insightful, such approaches limit the knowledge captured in textual representations of the spoken language. To overcome…
Phylogenetic trees are a central tool in understanding evolution. They are typically inferred from sequence data, and capture evolutionary relationships through time. It is essential to be able to compare trees from different data sources…
Many voice disorders induce subharmonic phonation, but voice signal analysis is currently lacking a technique to detect the presence of subharmonics reliably. Distinguishing subharmonic phonation from normal phonation is a challenging task…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
Phylogenetic networks are necessary to represent the tree of life expanded by edges to represent events such as horizontal gene transfers, hybridizations or gene flow. Not all species follow the paradigm of vertical inheritance of their…
One of the fundamental questions of cultural evolutionary research is how individual-level processes scale up to generate population-level patterns. Previous studies in music have revealed that frequency-based bias (e.g. conformity and…
Estimating the phylogeny of the genus Homo is entering a new phase of vastly improved data and methodology. There is increasing evidence of 6 to 10 competing species/lineages at any point in the last half million years, making the…
Linguistic typology studies the range of structures present in human language. The main goal of the field is to discover which sets of possible phenomena are universal, and which are merely frequent. For example, all languages have vowels,…