Denmark

**Author(s):** Erben Johansson, Niklas; Cronhamn, Sandra &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Intuitive, iconic associations between sound and meaning in grammaticalized linguistic units are poorly understood. Relatedly, the grammatical classification of nouns cross-linguistically involves semantic categories, e.g. sex, animacy and physical properties, which are usually iconic. This study investigates vocal iconicity in nominal classification systems in half of the world’s language families, consisting of 210 non-agreeing (e.g. classifier) and 151 agreeing (e.g. grammatical gender) systems. By analyzing the semantic scopes of the nominal classes and contained speech sounds through Bayesian mixed models, we assessed which sounds were overrepresented in which class meanings. The strongest overrepresentations were found in shape and size categories, but iconic effects were restricted to non-agreeing systems. Consequently, vocal iconicity is present on a grammatical level cross-linguistically, but only in semantically transparent nominal classes. These results indicate that the fundamental semantic properties of nouns can iconically influence how linguistic structure develops over time and help explain how language users categorize and conceptualize the world.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Vocal iconicity in nominal classification: How semantic properties can influence linguistic structure

cognitive linguistics; vocal iconicity; semantic typology; phonetic typology; grammaticalization; noun classification; categorization; conceptualization

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

**Author(s):** Erben Johansson, Niklas; Cronhamn, Sandra Intuitive, iconic associations between sound and meaning in grammaticalized linguistic units are poorly understood. Relatedly, the grammatical classification of nouns cross-linguistically involves semantic categories, e.g. sex, animacy and physical properties, which are usually iconic. This study investigates vocal iconicity in nominal classification systems in half of the world’s language families, consisting of 210 non-agreeing (e.g. classifier) and 151 agreeing (e.g. grammatical gender) systems. By analyzing the semantic scopes of the nominal classes and contained speech sounds through Bayesian mixed models, we assessed which sounds were overrepresented in which class meanings. The strongest overrepresentations were found in shape and size categories, but iconic effects were restricted to non-agreeing systems. Consequently, vocal iconicity is present on a grammatical level cross-linguistically, but only in semantically transparent nominal classes. These results indicate that the fundamental semantic properties of nouns can iconically influence how linguistic structure develops over time and help explain how language users categorize and conceptualize the world.

technical paper

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

##### ***For SoMe interaction and live tweeting please tag @CulturalEvolSoc and use #CESconf2022***


#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

**Author(s):** Ben-Oren, Y; Kolodny, O; Creanza, N The transition to specialization of knowledge within populations could have facilitated the accumulation of cultural complexity in humans. Specialization allows populations to increase their cultural repertoire without requiring that members of that population increase their individual capacity to accumulate knowledge. However, specialization also means that domain-specific knowledge can be concentrated in small subsets of the population, making it more susceptible to loss. Here we use a model of cultural evolution to demonstrate that specialized populations can be more sensitive to stochastic loss of knowledge than populations without subdivision of knowledge, and that demographic and environmental changes have an amplified effect on populations with knowledge specialization. Finally, we suggest that specialization can be a double-edged sword; specialized populations may have an advantage in accumulating cultural traits but may also be less likely to expand and establish themselves successfully in new demes due to the increased cultural loss that they experience during the population bottlenecks that often characterize such expansions.

Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss

**Author(s):** Sheard, C; Bowern, C; Jordan, F M Introduction: Human kinship systems, or how different cultural groups use language to classify family members, show remarkable global diversity, but they also seem to be constrained by social and cognitive limits. It is common within anthropology, for example, for kinship systems to be categorised into a mere six typologies, based on a few axes of variation in cousin terms. Despite the importance of kinship in structuring human society, however, there has been little work examining the cross-cultural drivers of, and constraints on, this diversity, and most of this scholarship has been limited to a handful of well-documented language families. Materials and Methods: Here, we present a survey of kinship systems in 71 Pama-Nyungan languages, representing all major branches of the largest Australian language family. We first describe the macroevolutionary dynamics of Pama-Nyungan kinship and test for evidence of stable kinship typologies. We then test hypotheses related to how social practice and spatial variables shape kinship systems. Results: We find only weak support for any clustering of languages by kinship system or for specific holes within the observed volume of kinship space, instead demonstrating that these ethnolinguistic groups’ kinship systems have evolved steadily over the past ~ 6,000 years. We find that community marriage norms, but not post-marital residency, correlate with kinship system. Furthermore, though we find evidence of spatial autocorrelation in the data above and beyond the effect of shared phylogenetic history, we find that spatial similarity in kinship systems is better explained by a correlation between kinship and the physical environment. Conclusions: By applying modern phylogenetic comparative methods to the study of language-culture coevolution, we thus demonstrate the importance of moving beyond traditional typological comparisons in the study of kinship, as well as caution against assuming the universal applicability of cultural evolution trends across all geographic and linguistic contexts.

Social practice and physical environment shape Pama-Nyungan kinship macroevolution, but not into stable typologies

**Author(s):** Hong, Ze; Chen, Yuqi Introduction: The study of rhetoric and argumentation has a long history in the western intellectual tradition, yet relatively less attention has been paid to its relationship between other cognitive themes such as reasoning and epistemology, as well as cultural and historical variation in persuasion practices in non-western contexts. Methods: We used keyword searches to identify persuasion episodes (763 total) in the official dynastic histories in China to systematically examine various rhetorical/argumentation strategies (e.g., argument by analogy, argument by authority, etc.) used in the past two millennia. Results: We found that early dynasties tend to have higher recorded persuasion success with the notable exception of the Ming dynasty, and there appears to be a temporal decline in the frequency in rhetorical strategies associated with persuasion failures (e.g., analogy and the use of auspicious/inauspicious signs). Conclusion: We found some support for adaptive cultural change in the type of arguments that people use. This study highlights the possibility of using rhetoric/argumentation as a tool to investigate reasoning and epistemology, as well as testing cultural evolutionary hypothesis using historical data.

Persuading the Emperors: A Quantitative Historical Analysis of Political Rhetoric in Traditional China

**Author(s):** Lightner, AD; Heckelsmiller, C; Hagen, EH Religious specialists invoke the supernatural while healing illnesses. We investigated such specialists in two studies. Study 1 analyzed medicinal specialists in 47 cultures in the Human Relations Area Files. We found specialists with supernatural theories in 74% of texts, often fulfilling practical, transactional roles for a clientele whose patronage hinges on expectations of efficacious treatment. Study 2 interviewed Tanzanian Maasai medicinal specialists and their clientele (N=84). We found that in the event of illness clients mainly selected specialists based on efficacy and religious identity. Participants also explained how medicinal plants work with highly abstract concepts that were not conspicuously supernatural. We review these findings and propose that, in many cases, (1) supernatural theories of disease are useful, abstract falsehoods that help explain complex and uncertain processes, such as illness; (2) specialists use these falsehoods to assist their clientele in a mutually beneficial exchange of services for resources; and (3) “religious” clients defer to specialists in a market, where patronage is conditional on effective solutions to uncertain and serious problems.

Supernatural theories of disease: Useful falsehoods in a market for specialists

**Author(s):** Atkinson, Q D; Bouckaert, R B; Gray, R D; Jones, K; Kyritsis, T; Redding, D; Sheehan, O Introduction: Since Darwin it has been recognized that global linguistic diversity is the product of millennia of cultural evolution. Over half of the world’s ~6-7000 languages are now threatened with extinction, yet we know little about the drivers of language diversification or its relationship to language threat. Methods: Here, we use Bayesian phylogenetic inference techniques to generate a supertree of all extant human languages that integrates prior knowledge and uncertainty about linguistic diversification around the globe. Results: We show that lower diversification rates (and hence higher evolutionary distinctness) are linked to very high or low population density and landscape traversability, as well as to cultures that are reliant on foraging and lack political links beyond the local community. Evolutionary distinctness is also associated with greater extinction risk. Conclusions: Our findings provide insight into the forces shaping language evolution, indicate more of the evolutionary history of languages is at risk than expected under a random threat distribution, and provide cross-cultural researchers with a supertree or the world’s languages.

Global language diversification rates are linked to socio-ecology and extinction risk

**Author(s):** Jansson F; Aguilar E; Acerbi A; Buskell A; Enquist M Introduction: Cultural traits are embedded in webs of relations and sequentially acquired and evaluated – filtered – in light of previously acquired traits. Incorporating multiple traits and their relations is needed to understand the organisation, dynamics, and emergent products of cultural evolution. Approach: We introduce a modelling framework of individual filtering of interdependent traits and explore the effects on cultural transmission and emergent phenomena, through mathematical treatment and simulations. Findings: Sequential acquisition of compatible traits leads to culturally evolved filters. These organise culture into mostly consistent and stable systems. Depending on the structure of trait relations, they modulate rates of cultural change, exhibit path dependence and punctuated equilibria, and can generate convergent transmission, clustering and polarisation. Discussion: A systems view of culture can give a fuller understanding of the source and character of emergent phenomena. It increases the scope of cultural evolution, whereby faithful transmission, self-organisation and filters can be accounted for by systems dynamics without strong assumptions on innate machinery.

Modelling Cultural Systems and Selective Filters

**Author(s):** Salali, GD; Uysal MS; Akpinar, E; Aksu, A; Bozyel, G Introduction: Studies to date have shown a strong correlation between belief in conspiracies and vaccine hesitancy. In this study, we go a step further and examine the pathway underlying the relationship between belief in health conspiracies and scepticism towards vaccines. We propose that conspiracy beliefs are deeply rooted in our tendency to form cultural groups, which throughout human evolution, has facilitated large-scale cooperation. We put forward the hypothesis that mistrust in outgroup members is the main driver of belief in conspiracies leading to vaccine hesitancy. Methods: In a demographically representative cross-cultural survey with over 4500 participants from the UK, US and Turkey, we tested this hypothesis and controlled for several psychological and demographic variables including psychological reactance, belief in science, general mistrust, political orientation, religiosity, sex, age, education and financial satisfaction. Results: Outgroup mistrust was the strongest predictor of belief in health (COVID-19-related) conspiracies across all countries, followed by psychological reactance- intolerance of others telling one what to do and being sceptical of consensus views. Control variables, including belief in science and general mistrust, had much weaker associations with the endorsement of health conspiracies compared to outgroup mistrust. There were considerable differences in the predictors of general conspiracy mentality and health-specific conspiracy beliefs, suggesting that distinct conspiracy beliefs have different psychological pathways. Our mediation analysis revealed that outgroup mistrust contributed to vaccine hesitancy through its association with health conspiracies. Participants in Turkey and the US scored higher on belief in health conspiracies, vaccine hesitancy and outgroup mistrust compared to the participants in the UK. The association between outgroup mistrust - but not reactance and belief in science- and health conspiracies held across countries. Discussion: These findings suggest that cultures exhibiting higher outgroup mistrust are more inclined to believe in health conspiracies and in turn exhibit higher levels of vaccine hesitancy. Considering these findings, we suggest ways to tackle conspiracy beliefs and vaccine hesitancy.

Outgroup mistrust drives the link between health conspiracy beliefs and vaccine hesitancy across cultures

**Author(s):** Hagen, RV; Scelza, BA; Barrett, HC Introduction: Patriarchy likely has its roots in an evolutionary history of sexual conflict, but variation in women's interests in gender norms today is often overlooked. We consider whether women themselves can sometimes benefit from unequal gender norms, such as through gains from alliances with high-status men or benefits to male offspring. Also, younger women may experience higher costs than older women. We test whether these hypothesized interests are reflected in stated gender attitudes. Methods: We use survey data from China (n = 4126), Taiwan (2024), Japan (2660) and South Korea (1051) and Bayesian multi-level regression models to test predictions. Findings: In most countries, women’s views grow more patriarchal with age at a rate faster than for men (Taiwan: β = -.07, P(β < 0) = .88, China: β = -.10, P(β < 0) = .99, Japan: β = 0.0, P(β < 0) = .52, S Korea: β = -.06, P(β < 0) = .76), suggesting this is not due to generational norm changes alone. The predicted SES-effect was only found in Taiwan (β = -.28, P(β < 0) = .93). In China (β = -.09, P(β < 0) = .95) and S Korea (β = -. 22, P(β < 0) = .94) a higher ratio of sons to daughters is linked with more unequal gender views, and this is mostly driven by an item representing son preference. Discussion: Some of the variation in people’s attitudes to gender norms may be explained through their varying interests in such norms. The costs women experience from unequal norms likely decrease with age. Having more sons is associated with a stronger son-preference, but does not affect other norms tested in this study.

Understanding women's support for patriarchal gender norms in four East Asian countries

 Why do humans spend valuable resources on mortuary rituals? Evidence from fieldwork in a Romanian village and ethnographic literature suggests that costly signals of generosity activate intuitions about cooperation with the dead represented by an enduring “person-file system” (Boyer 2002). Performers use rituals to increase their reputation as cooperators as well as powerful and wealthy people (Hayden 2009). Family, relatives, friends, and other consociates perceive such investments as mutualistic cooperation (Baumard 2016) calibrated according to partner value. The model explains some recurrent features: fear of ancestor vengeance and peer moralization for ritual omission or underinvestment, the preferential treatment of the dead’s partners, variable but finite timescale of mortuary dues, overinvestment for high-status dead, the irrelevancy of grief, and the role of inheritance. Cultural attraction (Sperber 1996) can explain similarities and variability in ritual expenditure across societies.

Mortuary ritual investment as cues of mutualistic cooperation beyond death

Here we use the tools of behavioural ecology to try and understand the evolution of religious beliefs and practices; specifically our recent studies of the causes and consequences of religious celibacy in Amdo Tibetans (in western PRC). Historically a large number of young boys were sent to live a celibate life in monasteries. We find that this apparently costly practice of sending sons to the monastery, does in fact have kin selected benefits for other family members. We also examine the implication for local sex ratios, and for the workloads of men and women. It appears that ecology and kin selection can underpin apparently costly behaviours, generating gender biased behaviour and even the emergence of religious institutions.

Premium content

Vocal iconicity in nominal classification: How semantic properties can influence linguistic structure

Downloads

Next from Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss

Similar lecture

Finding a Balanced Degree of Automation for Summary Evaluation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRODUCT

COMPANY

RESOURCES