English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Weak biases emerging from vocal tract anatomy shape the repeated transmission of vowels

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons34

Dediu,  Dan
Language and Genetics Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage, Université Lumière Lyon;
Collegium de Lyon, Institut d’Études Avancées;
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, External Organizations;

/persons/resource/persons188915

Janssen,  Rick
Language and Genetics Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons103072

Moisik,  Scott R.
Language and Genetics Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University;

External Resource
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Dediu, D., Janssen, R., & Moisik, S. R. (2019). Weak biases emerging from vocal tract anatomy shape the repeated transmission of vowels. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 1107-1115. doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0663-x.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0004-7F44-2
Abstract
Linguistic diversity is affected by multiple factors, but it is usually assumed that variation in the anatomy of our speech organs
plays no explanatory role. Here we use realistic computer models of the human speech organs to test whether inter-individual
and inter-group variation in the shape of the hard palate (the bony roof of the mouth) affects acoustics of speech sounds. Based
on 107 midsagittal MRI scans of the hard palate of human participants, we modelled with high accuracy the articulation of a set
of five cross-linguistically representative vowels by agents learning to produce speech sounds. We found that different hard
palate shapes result in subtle differences in the acoustics and articulatory strategies of the produced vowels, and that these
individual-level speech idiosyncrasies are amplified by the repeated transmission of language across generations. Therefore,
we suggest that, besides culture and environment, quantitative biological variation can be amplified, also influencing language.