Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

This paper presents a preliminary description and analysis of prosodic features (amplitude, duration and rhythm) observed in Northern muriquis vocalizations. The northern muriqui (Brachyteles hypoxanthus) is an endangered primate species which lives in Atlantic forests of Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo, Brazil.

Most studies of vocalizations with chimpanzees and Bonobos focus on the interpretation of the vocal behaviour of both captive and free-ranging groups to relate sounds produced to their semantic contexts. Spectrographic analyses reveal the acoustic structure of the vocalizations but rarely raise the question of the specific articulatory capacities of Bonobos in relation to the acoustics. This point is essential if one wants to understand the articulatory control that Bonobos have on their vocalizations. It is also important when the vocalizations of Bonobos and the sound produced by modern humans are compared.

The origin of phonological systems is examined from the paradigm of self-organization. We claim that phonological systems could have emerged as the product of self-organizing processes. Self-organization may have facilitated the evolution of structures within the sounds that humans were able to produce. One of the main points of the paper concerns the identification of the processes which could account for the self-organized behavior of sound systems used in languages spoken by humans. In this paradigm, phonological systems or sound patterns of human languages are emergent properties of these systems rather than properties imposed by some external influence. Regulations are defined as the constraints that adjust the rate of production of the elements of a system to the state of the system and of relevant environmental variables. The main operators of these adjustments are feedback loops. Two types of processes can be distinguished in regulatory networks, homeostatic and epigenetic. Since the origin of sound patterns, of human languages, is in the vocal tract constraints, we make the hypothesis that sound change does not reflect any adaptive character but rather is the phonetic modality of differentiation understood as epigenetic regulation.