Russell Gray
Cognitive science and the challenge of linguistic diversity
Saturday, October 26, 2024, 8:30 – 9:30 am, Great Hall 1
Chair: William Matchin, University of South Carolina
Speaker: Russell Gray FRSNZ, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig and School of Psychology, University of Auckland
The diversity of human languages poses a challenge: if language is a cognitive tool for efficient communication and social coordination, why are approximately 7000 mutually unintelligible languages spoken across the globe today? For some cognitive scientists, this diversity is only superficial, while it is a fundamental feature for others. In this talk, I will argue that the current trend of including some token non-European subjects doesn’t really meet the challenge of linguistic diversity in a theory-driven way. I will outline how new global linguistic databases such as Lexibank and Grambank can be used to select languages and test claims about putative universals in emotion and grammar in a more principled way. I will describe an analysis of emotion semantics across 2474 spoken languages using “colexification”—a phenomenon in which languages name semantically related concepts with the same word. The study shows significant variation in networks of emotion concept colexification. However, the results also reveal a universal structure, with all families differentiating emotions based on hedonic valence and physiological activation. I will report new analyses using Bayesian phylogenetic methods to test 191 putative grammatical universals. The results show strong statistical support for around one-third of the proposed linguistic universals. This suggests that despite the enormous combinatorial flexibility of language systems, shared cognitive and communicative pressures mean that languages repeatedly evolve toward the same preferred regions of design space. Finally, much of the research on linguistic universals tends to assume that relatively constant neural structures underpin the diversity of languages. I will conclude the talk by reviewing recent evidence that challenges this view and suggests that the languages we speak adaptively change patterns of neural connectivity.
About Russell Gray
Russell Gray completed his Ph.D. at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1990. He spent four years lecturing at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, before returning to the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. From June 2014 Russell Gray was Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. In June 2020 he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has been awarded several prestigious fellowships, including the inaugural Mason Durie Medal for his contributions to social science. Russell Gray's research spans the areas of linguistics, animal cognition, philosophy of biology and the evolution of human and animal behaviour. He pioneered the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution. He has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters including ten papers in Nature and Science. More information can found here.