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Eliciting and Analyzing Male Mouse Ultrasonic Vocalization USV Songs
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Inferring recent evolutionary changes in speech sounds.

Steven Moran1, Nicholas A Lester2, Eitan Grossman3

  • 1Institute of Biology, University of Neuchâtel, Rue Emile-Argand 11, G B35, 2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
|March 22, 2021
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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Recent language contact has significantly altered speech sound distributions globally. Ancient and modern phonological inventories differ, showing language evolution over the last two millennia.

Keywords:
language contactlanguage evolutionphonology

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Historical Linguistics
  • Phonetics

Background:

  • Understanding language evolution is crucial for linguistic theory.
  • Previous studies often assume static cross-linguistic distributions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • Investigate recent evolutionary changes in global speech sound distributions.
  • Analyze the impact of language contact on phonological inventories over the past 2000 years.

Main Methods:

  • Comparative analysis of phonological inventories from ancient, reconstructed, and present-day languages.
  • Utilizing three extensive databases of phonological data.
  • Quantifying the role of language contact in sound distribution shifts.

Main Results:

  • Significant discrepancies exist between ancient and contemporary speech sound distributions.
  • Language contact demonstrably shaped phonological inventories in recent millennia.
  • Observed homogenization of speech sound distributions across geographic macro-areas.

Conclusions:

  • The Implicit Uniformitarian Hypothesis regarding phonological inventories requires critical re-evaluation.
  • Short-term language evolution must be considered when inferring linguistic universals from current data.
  • Language contact is a powerful driver of recent phonological change.