Abstract
Human language may have evolved through a stage when words were combined into structured linear segments, before these segments were used as building blocks for a hierarchical grammar. This hypothesis is approached by examining the apparently ubiquitous prevalence of homophones. It suggests how, perhaps contrary to expectation, communicative capacity does not seem to be adversely affected by homophones, and how it is that they can be routinely used without confusion. These facts are principally explained by disambiguation through syntactic processing of short word sequences. Local sequential processing plays an underlying role in language production and perception, a hypothesis that is supported by evidence that small children engage in this process as soon as they acquire words. Experiments on a corpus of spoken English calculated the entropy for sequences of syntactically labelled words. They show there is a measurable advantage in decoding word strings when they are taken in short sequences, rather than as individual items. This suggests that grammatical fragments of speech could have been a stepping stone to a full grammar.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Arnfield, S.: Prosody and Syntax in Corpus Based Analysis of Spoken English. PhD thesis, University of Leeds (1994)
Bell, T.C., Cleary, J.G., Witten, I.H.: Text Compression. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1990)
Cover, T.M., Thomas, J.A.: Elements of Information Theory. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (1991)
Eimas, P.: The perception and representation of speech by infants. In: Morgan, J., Demuth, K. (eds.) Signal to Syntax, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah (1996)
Fisher, C.: The role of abstract syntactic knowledge in language acquisition: A reply to Tomasello. Cognition 82(3), 259–278 (2002)
Garside, R.: The CLAWS word tagging system. In: Garside, R., Leech, G., Sampson, G. (eds.) The Computational Analysis of English: A Corpus Based Approach, Longman, Harlow (1987)
Ke, J., Wang, F., Coupe, C.: The rise and fall of homophones: A window to language evolution. In: Proceedings of 4th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (2002)
Lieberman, P.: On the nature and evolution of the neural bases of human language. In: Yearbook of Physical Anthropology (2002)
Lyon, C., Dickerson, B., Nehaniv, C.L.: The segmentation of speech and its implications for the emergence of language structure. Evolution of Communication 4(2), 161–182 (2003)
Maddieson, I.: Patterns of sounds. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1984)
MARSEC. Machine Readable Spoken English Corpus. http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ll/speechlab/marsec/
Mazuka, R.: Can a grammatical parameter be set before the first word? Prosodic contributions to early setting of a grammatical parameter. In: Morgan, J., Demuth, K. (eds.) Signal to Syntax, pp. 313–330. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah (1996)
Morgan, J., Demuth, K.: Signal to syntax: An overview. In: Morgan, J., Demuth, K. (eds.) Signal to Syntax, pp. 263–283. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah (1996)
Nehaniv, C.L.: Meaning for observers and agents. In: IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control / Intelligent Systems & Semiotics (ISIC/ISAS’99), pp. 435–440. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1999)
Nehaniv, C.L.: The making of meaning in societies: Semiotic and information-theoretic background to the evolution of communication. In: Edmonds, B., Dautenhahn, K. (eds.) Proc. AISB Symposium: Starting from Society - the application of social analogies to computational systems, pp. 73–84. Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Behaviour (2000)
Nowak, M.A., Komarova, N.L., Niyogi, P.: Computational and evolutionary aspects of language. Nature 417, 611–617 (2002)
Plotkin, J.B., Nowak, M.A.: Language evolution and information theory. Journal of Theoretical Biology 205, 147–159 (2000)
Shannon, C.E.: Prediction and entropy of printed English (1951). In: Sloane, N.J.A., Wyner, A.D. (eds.) Shannon: Collected Papers, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1993)
Tomasello, M., Brooks, P.: Early syntactic development: a construction grammar account. In: Barrett, M. (ed.) The Development of Language, Psychology Press, Hove (1999)
Wang, W., Ke, J., Minett, J.: Computational studies of language evolution. In: Proceedings of COLING (2002)
Warren, P., Rae, M., Hay, J.: Goldilocks and the three beers. In: 9th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (2002)
Warren, S.: Phonological Acquisition and Ambient Language: A Corpus Based, Cross-Linguistic Exploration. PhD thesis, University of Hertfordshire, UK (2001)
Waxman, S., Markow, D.: Words as invitations to form categories: evidence from 12- to 13-month-old-infants. Cognitive Psychology 29(3) (1995)
Wittgenstein, L.: Philosophical Investigations (Translated by G. Anscombe). Blackwell, Malden (1953)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lyon, C., Nehaniv, C.L., Warren, S., Dickerson, B., Baillie, J. (2007). Homophony and Disambiguation Through Sequential Processes in the Evolution of Language. In: Sakurai, A., Hasida, K., Nitta, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI JSAI 2003 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3609. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71009-7_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71009-7_28
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-71008-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-71009-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)