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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

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Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
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The genomes of eukaryotes are punctuated by long stretches of sequence which do not code for proteins or RNAs. Although some of these regions do contain crucial regulatory sequences, the vast majority of this DNA serves no known function. Typically, these regions of the genome are the ones in which the fastest change, in evolutionary terms, is observed, because there is typically little to no selection pressure acting on these regions to preserve their sequences.
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Language, whether spoken, signed, or written, consists of specific components: lexicon and grammar. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language, comprising its words. Grammar is the set of rules used to convey meaning through the lexicon. For example, English grammar adds “-ed” to most verbs to indicate past tense. Words are formed by combining phonemes, which are the basic sound units of a language. Different languages have different sets of phonemes (e.g., “ah” vs.
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Genome comparison is one of the excellent ways to interpret the evolutionary relationships between organisms. The basic principle of genome comparison is that if two species share a common feature, it is likely encoded by the DNA sequence conserved between both species. The advent of genome sequencing technologies in the late 20th century enabled scientists to understand the concept of conservation of domains between species and helped them to deduce evolutionary relationships across diverse...
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In a population that is not at Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the frequency of alleles changes over time. Therefore, any deviations from the five conditions of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium can alter the genetic variation of a given population. Conditions that change the genetic variability of a population include mutations, natural selection, non-random mating, gene flow, and genetic drift (small population size).
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Following the Dynamics of Structural Variants in Experimentally Evolved Populations
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Detecting evolutionary forces in language change.

Mitchell G Newberry1, Christopher A Ahern2, Robin Clark2

  • 1Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA.

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|November 2, 2017
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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Language evolution, like gene evolution, involves transmission and replication. This study quantifies selection versus random drift in English grammar changes, finding evidence for selection in some cases, like irregular verbs, and highlighting drift

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Area of Science:

  • Evolutionary linguistics
  • Computational linguistics
  • Historical linguistics

Background:

  • Both genetic and linguistic systems evolve through transmission across generations.
  • Random genetic drift is a key mechanism in evolutionary biology, affecting gene frequencies without natural selection.
  • Stochastic drift, arising from random copying errors, is hypothesized to influence language change.

Observation:

  • Analysis of English texts from the 12th to 21st centuries examined grammatical changes.
  • Three specific changes studied were past-tense verb regularization, the use of periphrastic 'do', and verbal negation variation.
  • Time-series data from large corpora provided quantitative insights into these linguistic shifts.

Findings:

  • Evidence suggests selection, not just stochastic drift, drives some language changes.
  • Selection favors irregular past-tense verbs, potentially due to evolving rhyming patterns.
  • Stochastic drift is more pronounced for rare words, explaining their higher replacement rates.

Implications:

  • The study offers a quantitative method to test theories of language change against random drift.
  • It reveals that stochasticity plays a significant, often underappreciated, role in language evolution.
  • Findings contribute to understanding the interplay between selection and randomness in cultural evolution.