Matt Spike

the life logistic

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Assignments

Overview:

The aim of the assignments on this course is to start building up a wiki-style collection of material on any and all topics connected to language evolution, which your submission will contribute to. My other intention is to give you the opportunity to try to submit your ideas in a non-traditional, i.e. not necessarily anything that looks like an academic essay. This could include:

Written work, but in the form of an article in a popular science venue (for example), a blog, or a tutorial introduction to some topic (such as one would expect in a wiki), or anything else you can come up with. Or even an academic-style essay!
Audio recordings: this could be a podcast discussion between a group of students on a linked theme, or an individually presented documentary-style segment, or even an interview with a researcher on their work.
A recorded video in some format, such as a conference-style presentation, an informal lecture, an educational video or tutorial, and so on.
(for the brave or foolhardy) An interactive presentation using some web technology.
Anything else you can think of!

What you need to do:

Think of a general topic: basically, choose any topic which has come up so far on the course that you found interesting and would like to know more about. For some people, this will be easy; for others, it can be very difficult and disorienting. I have put some suggestions in a section later on which you can feel free to use or adapt as you like, but feel free to pick something completely different, and come to me if you still feel lost (which is totally fine and expected, this is a massive topic after all).
Think of a specific, concrete, targeted question within that topic. This is easier said than done! All of the topics we have covered have such a wide scope that it’s very easy to get lost in the literature, chasing down new papers in unfamiliar disciplines. I speak from personal experience when i say that this can be very disorienting! There are a number of ways to avoid this, luckily. Two examples are: * Choose a specific target paper to focus on, and concentrate on how it interacts with the rest of the literature. If the paper is a bit older, see how it looks in the light of new evidence. If other papers agree or (more likely) disagree with it, find out how and see if you agree. * Choose a very specific question. For example, instead of ‘What is social evolution’, something like ‘what evidence do these studies of social behaviour of wild chimpanzees in Uganda contribute to our understanding of human social evolution?’
Choose a medium, style of presentation, and collaborators if necessary. As above, this can be anything from a individual piece of work such as a traditional academic essay, to a pair discussion in a podcast, to a group of you creating an educational-style video. Some people will be tempted to do something wildly ambitious here, but be very careful here as some types of presentation take a lot more work than others, for example planning, preparing, and editing a video.
Tell me what your project is, or if you’re feeling totally lost I’ll create a channel on Teams for people to tell me their plans - if you’d rather not discuss it in public just say so in there and I can contact you more directly (whether you’re planning to work individually or in a group).
Plan your project: * What is your exact topic? * How will you structure you project into smaller parts? How do they connect? * What materials do you need? * How long do you think preparation and practicalities such as editing will take? * Triple the above number * Rethink your plans in the light of the new, bigger number * If working as a group:
- Assign roles - who does what?
- In light of the above, try to structure roles in a modular way. What happens if someone gets ill? What happens if part of someone’s plan doesn’t work out? Whose work relies on someone else’s, and can you think of ways to avoid a bottleneck?

Caveats

As above, keep the following in the front of your mind as much as possible:

Scope: are you trying to cover too much material?
Demands of the task: are you being too ambitious?
Content not length: a 2000 word essay is not the same amount of work as a video with 2000 words in it. Think about the topics and content you would put in an essay of that length, and think about how that would translate into your chosen for, and importantly, how much work/time that will entail.
Collaboration practicalities: how will you communicate, when and where will you meet, and very importantly how can you structure the project so it won’t get thrown off track if someone gets ill etc.

You can always, of course, come to me with any questions you might have!

Specifics:

The assignment is your opportunity to show that you understand more than the content of the lectures and set readings – you should take it as a chance to show that you have carried out independent reading beyond the syllabus, can produce your own interpretation of the material you have read, and use it to build your own arguments and analysis Try to find your own material - work which doesn’t depart significantly from the set content of the course (lecture and tutorial readings) and/or which only work with the ‘starter’ readings will have a much harder time getting a good mark. You must demonstrate critical engagement with the course content and the wider literature – ideally you will show that you have approached the question in an open-minded but skeptical manner, carefully seeking out, scrutinising, and evaluating the evidence behind theories and ideas, and drawing your own conclusions that represent a fair consideration of the available evidence. Finally, it may sound superfluous, but many students forget this: after finishing your project, look at it at least one more time! For written work, for example, reading out loud is especially useful: if you stumble to process sentences you just wrote, your reader will probably be stopped in their tracks (in a bad way). Never forget your audience: imagine you are your intended reader/listener/viewer and check if you would make sense, and if your explanations are clear enough. Whether written or otherwise, it is better to have short and understandable sentences than to spin long one-sentence arguments. Keep it simple and clear - this is an important and surprisingly difficult skill (and rare in academia, alas)!

Finding literature

You need to be targeted in identifying relevant articles to read for your specific essay topic. The starter articles for each topic are intended to give you an opening into the literature, so you should use them to guide your initial search (but don’t feel constrained by them). There are several ways you could do this.

Check for relevant work by the same authors - look for their personal or institutional webpage, or find their Google Scholar profile, and look through other research they have done.
Perform targeted searches on Google Scholar or DiscoverED. Googling “language evolution” is not going to get you very far for these assignments - these are specific topics that require specific reading. Look for phrases you want to know more about to conduct specific searches.
Work outwards from a focal paper. Look at the reference list of the paper you are reading and chase up papers that they cite - this will allow you to work backwards in time from your focal paper. To work forwards in time, find papers which cite the focal paper you are reading. For all these approaches, keep an eye out for reliable, in-depth sources: e.g., trust peer-reviewed journals over brief conference abstracts or popular reports. Various tools exist to make working outwards from a focal paper easier, and this is generally a useful and popular method. Google Scholar provides a list of papers which cite a given paper, allowing you to work forward. Web of Science (http:// wok.mimas.ac.uk) makes it easy to go both forwards and backwards in time – for every paper on there, there is a linked list of papers it cites and papers that cite it. You can apply these procedures recursively – there may be relevant papers in the papers that cite a paper that cites your focal paper, and so on. A combination of these techniques should get you started, and will probably generate more papers than you can possibly read, so you need to be somewhat selective. Use the title and abstract of a paper to get the gist of what it’s about, and pursue the papers which you think will provide the most relevant evidence, or which are most helpful (or most difficult) for the argument you are trying to develop. And look for converging evidence – few single papers provide an uncontroversial and definitive “truth” on any subject, but a converging body of work showing the same sort of results should give you more confidence.

Example topics (now extended)

Important things to keep in mind when writing

The first thee questions relate to the first half of the course, and the next three relate to the second half, but:

For your second assignment, you can choose to write on any one of the six, i.e. it doesn’t have to be one of 4-6.
You should not feel constrained by the question, so:
- If you only want to talk about part of the question and ignore the rest, go for it
- If you want to address a partially related question, go for it
- If you want to write about a more general topic wnich includeds the question, go for it
- If you want to combine two questions in some way, go for it
You can write in your chosen style, e.g. academic or less formal
Just go with whatever you think is most interesting - if you dread having to deal with some issue, just say you won’t be addressing it and chuck it in the bin
No academic (outside of planned empirical work, and even then often not) sticks to the plan or question they started with
- This is for a very good reason: if you’re doing research on something, that means you’re studying the unknown, and it’s impossible to anticipate what you’ll run into and how that will affect your original ideas.
- This is true for any kind of (interesting) research, whether a lit review or theoretical or empirical, and it’s a good thing.
- This means you can always change your initial question to fit your finished project, and in fact that’s what almost always happens.
- This also, incidentally, means that the structure of almost all assessment from school to the end of grad school is fundamentally broken, but we won’t fix that today
Make clarity and simple expression of complex ideas your guiding principle, and…
…honestly just try to have fun with it, if remotely possible! Finally:
Writing that is clear and expressive makes your marker incredible grateful, and grateful markers give grateful marks

Example topics

Humans are unusual in possessing language, but we are also unusually adept tool users, and are capable of forming and executing complex plans. Are our linguistic capacities related to our abilities in tool use and planning, and can these nonlinguistic capacities tell us something about the evolution of language?

Steedman, M. (2014). Evolutionary basis for human language: A comment on Fitch 2014. Physics of Life Reviews, 11, 382-388. Stout, D., Toth, N., Schick, K., & Chaminade, T. (2008). Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 363, 1939-1949.

Humans are prolific word learners, learning tens of thousands of words in a short space of time. Do humans have cognitive specializations for word learning, and if so, do these represent cognitive adaptations (the product of natural selection, rewarding better word learners), or something else?

Kaminski, J., Call, J., & Fischer, J. (2004). Word learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for “Fast Mapping”. Science, 304, 1682-1683. Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: what’s special about it? Cognition, 95, 201-236.

There is a small industry in studying the ability of humans and non-human animals to learn artificial grammars. Some people think this work is important for understanding key cognitive differences between humans and non-human animals, and therefore the evolution of language in humans. Others think it’s either badly done or conceptually flawed or both. What do you think, and why?

A recent trend in evolutionary linguistics has been to simulate the process of language evolution experimentally, studying how languages are shaped by their learning and use in laboratory populations of adult humans. However, adult humans may not be the ideal population to use for these studies, for example because they already know at least one natural language. Is this concern valid, and can it be overcome by studying EITHER humans communicating using a novel medium e.g. drawings) OR computational simulations of the same processes? [Your answer should probably focus on communication in a novel medium or simulation, not both]

Fay, N., & Ellison, M. E. (2013). The cultural evolution of human communication systems in different sized populations: Usability trumps learnability. PLOS ONE, 8, e71781. Kirby, S., Tamariz, M., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2015). Compression and Communication in the Cultural Evolution of Linguistic Structure. Cognition, 141, 87-102.**

A protolanguage is an intermediate stage between the non-linguistic communication systems of early hominids and modern language. Were the earliest forms of protolanguage more akin to music, or pantomime? Whatever your answer is, be sure to explain what sources of evidence you can use to support your argument, and how your hypothesis can be tested.

Arbib, M. A. (2005). From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 105–167. Fitch, W. T. (2006). The biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective. Cognition, 100, 173-215.

Silent gesture, a laboratory methodology in which participants use their hands (and no speech) to convey information, has been taken up as a way to study how people order constituents in the absence of a system of linguistic conventions. Is silent gesture a viable method to study the origins of language? How exactly can silent gesture tell us something about the evolution of language? What are shortcomings of the method, and how can one overcome these?

Goldin-Meadow, S., So, W. C., Özyürek, A., & Mylander, C. (2008). The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(27), 9163-9168. Meir, I., Aronoff, M., Börstell, C., Hwang, S. O., Ilkbasaran, D., Kastner, I., … & Sandler, W. (2017). The effect of being human and the basis of grammatical word order: Insights from novel communication systems and young sign languages. Cognition, 158, 189-207.