Language data scientist. Interested in diversity linguistics, in particular historical linguistics, typology, dialectology, and linguistic geography. Theoretical physicist in my previous life.
The Bantu expansion transformed the linguistic, economic, and cultural composition of sub-Saharan... more The Bantu expansion transformed the linguistic, economic, and cultural composition of sub-Saharan Africa. However, the exact dates and routes taken by the ancestors of the speakers of the more than 500 current Bantu languages remain uncertain. Here, we use the recently developed “break-away” geographical diffusion model, specially designed for modeling migrations, with “augmented” geographic information, to reconstruct the Bantu language family expansion. This Bayesian phylogeographic approach with augmented geographical data provides a powerful way of linking linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data to test hypotheses about large language family expansions. We compare four hypotheses: an early major split north of the rainforest; a migration through the Sangha River Interval corridor around 2,500 BP; a coastal migration around 4,000 BP; and a migration through the rainforest before the corridor opening, at 4,000 BP. Our results produce a topology and timeline for the Bantu lang...
Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcr... more Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcriptions from 600 language varieties from eleven language families around the world. This resource is designed to serve researchers in phonetics, phonology and related fields. Transcriptions follow new initiatives for standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the transcription datasets by phonetically-informed search and filtering, customise selections of languages and words, download any targeted data subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it through a custom URL. We present sample research applications based on our extensive coverage of regional and sociolinguistic variation within major languages, and also of endangered languages, for which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-to-hear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach tool, where speakers can instantaneously hear and compare the phonetic diversity and relationships of their native languages.
Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcr... more Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcriptions from 600 language varieties from eleven language families around the world. This resource is designed to serve researchers in phonetics, phonology and related fields. Transcriptions follow new initiatives for standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the transcription datasets by phonetically-informed search and filtering, customise selections of languages and words, download any targeted data subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it through a custom URL. We present sample research applications based on our extensive coverage of regional and sociolinguistic variation within major languages, and also of endangered languages, for which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-tohear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach too...
There is increasing interest in cumulative approaches to science, in which instead of analyzing t... more There is increasing interest in cumulative approaches to science, in which instead of analyzing the results of individual papers separately, we integrate information qualitatively or quantitatively. One such approach is meta-analysis, which has over 50 years of literature supporting its usefulness, and is becoming more common in cognitive science. However, changes in technical possibilities by the widespread use of Python and R make it easier to fit more complex models, and even simulate missing data. Here we recommend the use of mega-analyses (based on the aggregation of data sets collected by independent researchers) and hybrid meta- mega-analytic approaches, for cases where raw data is available for some studies. We illustrate the three approaches using a rich test-retest data set of infants’ speech processing as well as synthetic data. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the three approaches from the viewpoint of a cognitive scientists contemplating their use, and limitat...
There is increasing interest in cumulative approaches to science, in which instead of analyzing t... more There is increasing interest in cumulative approaches to science, in which instead of analyzing the results of individual papers separately, we integrate information qualitatively or quantitatively. One such approach is meta-analysis, which has over 50 years of literature supporting its usefulness, and is becoming more common in cognitive science. However, changes in technical possibilities by the widespread use of Python and R make it easier to fit more complex models, and even simulate missing data. Here we recommend the use of mega-analyses (based on the aggregation of data sets collected by independent researchers) and hybrid meta-mega-analytic approaches, for cases where raw data is available for some studies. We illustrate the three approaches using a rich test-retest data set of infants' speech processing as well as synthetic data. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the three approaches from the viewpoint of a cognitive scientists contemplating their use, and limitations of this article, to be addressed in future work.
The Tungusic language family is comprised of languages spoken in Siberia, the Russian Far East, N... more The Tungusic language family is comprised of languages spoken in Siberia, the Russian Far East, Northeast China and Xinjiang. There is a general consensus that these languages are genealogically related and descend from a common ancestral language. Nevertheless, there is considerable disagreement with regard to the internal structure of the Tungusic family and the time depth of its separation into daughter languages. Here we use computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods to generate a phylogeny of Tungusic languages and estimate the time-depth of the family. Our analysis is based on the recently introduced Leipzig-Jakarta-Jena list, a dataset of 254 basic vocabulary items collected for 21 Tungusic doculects. Our results are consistent with two basic classifications previously proposed in the literature, notably a Manchu-Tungusic classification, in which the break-up of Jurchenic constitutes the first split in the tree, as well as a North-South classification, which includes a Jurch...
En esta Tesis se realiza un estudio pormenorizado de la dispersión inelástica profunda (DIS) de l... more En esta Tesis se realiza un estudio pormenorizado de la dispersión inelástica profunda (DIS) de leptones por mesones para acoplamiento fuerte y en el límite planar a partir de modelos duales basados en la correspondencia AdS/CFT. Se estudia la estructura de mesones escalares y mesones vectoriales en su polarización más general, con grados de libertad de sabor en el contexto de los modelos de D3D7-branas en la teoría de supercuerdas del tipo IIB y de D4D8D8- y D4D6D6-branas en la teoría de supercuerdas del tipo IIA. El primer caso se trata de una teoría de gauge en 3+1 dimensiones que preserva N = 2 supersimetrías, mientras que los últimos dos corresponden a teorías de Yang-Mills no supersimétricas. Se estudian los límites del parámetro de Bjorken x del orden de 1, que requiere de una descripción de supergravedad, y el límite x mucho menor que 1, para el cual los cálculos se deben hacer mediante la teoría de cuerdas. También se estudia la sección eficaz diferencial de dispersión en d...
Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019, 2019
Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcr... more Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcriptions from 600 language varieties from eleven language families around the world. This resource is designed to serve researchers in phonetics, phonology and related fields. Transcriptions follow new initiatives for standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the transcription datasets by phonetically-informed search and filtering, customise selections of languages and words, download any targeted data subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it through a custom URL. We present sample research applications based on our extensive coverage of regional and sociolinguistic variation within major languages, and also of endangered languages, for which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-to-hear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach tool, where speakers can instantaneously hear and compare the phonetic diversity and relationships of their native languages.
International Congress of Phonetic Sciences Full Papers, 2019
Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual
word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic
transcr... more Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcriptions from 600 language varieties from eleven language families around the world. This resource is designed to serve researchers in phonetics, phonology and related fields. Transcriptions follow new initiatives for standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the transcription datasets by phonetically-informed search and filtering, customise selections of languages and words, download any targeted data subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it through a custom URL. We present sample research applications based on our extensive coverage of regional and sociolinguistic variation within major languages, and also of endangered languages, for which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-tohear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach tool, where speakers can instantaneously hear and compare the phonetic diversity and relationships of their native languages.
The Bantu expansion transformed the linguistic, economic, and cultural composition of sub-Saharan... more The Bantu expansion transformed the linguistic, economic, and cultural composition of sub-Saharan Africa. However, the exact dates and routes taken by the ancestors of the speakers of the more than 500 current Bantu languages remain uncertain. Here, we use the recently developed “break-away” geographical diffusion model, specially designed for modeling migrations, with “augmented” geographic information, to reconstruct the Bantu language family expansion. This Bayesian phylogeographic approach with augmented geographical data provides a powerful way of linking linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data to test hypotheses about large language family expansions. We compare four hypotheses: an early major split north of the rainforest; a migration through the Sangha River Interval corridor around 2,500 BP; a coastal migration around 4,000 BP; and a migration through the rainforest before the corridor opening, at 4,000 BP. Our results produce a topology and timeline for the Bantu lang...
Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcr... more Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcriptions from 600 language varieties from eleven language families around the world. This resource is designed to serve researchers in phonetics, phonology and related fields. Transcriptions follow new initiatives for standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the transcription datasets by phonetically-informed search and filtering, customise selections of languages and words, download any targeted data subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it through a custom URL. We present sample research applications based on our extensive coverage of regional and sociolinguistic variation within major languages, and also of endangered languages, for which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-to-hear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach tool, where speakers can instantaneously hear and compare the phonetic diversity and relationships of their native languages.
Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcr... more Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcriptions from 600 language varieties from eleven language families around the world. This resource is designed to serve researchers in phonetics, phonology and related fields. Transcriptions follow new initiatives for standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the transcription datasets by phonetically-informed search and filtering, customise selections of languages and words, download any targeted data subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it through a custom URL. We present sample research applications based on our extensive coverage of regional and sociolinguistic variation within major languages, and also of endangered languages, for which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-tohear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach too...
There is increasing interest in cumulative approaches to science, in which instead of analyzing t... more There is increasing interest in cumulative approaches to science, in which instead of analyzing the results of individual papers separately, we integrate information qualitatively or quantitatively. One such approach is meta-analysis, which has over 50 years of literature supporting its usefulness, and is becoming more common in cognitive science. However, changes in technical possibilities by the widespread use of Python and R make it easier to fit more complex models, and even simulate missing data. Here we recommend the use of mega-analyses (based on the aggregation of data sets collected by independent researchers) and hybrid meta- mega-analytic approaches, for cases where raw data is available for some studies. We illustrate the three approaches using a rich test-retest data set of infants’ speech processing as well as synthetic data. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the three approaches from the viewpoint of a cognitive scientists contemplating their use, and limitat...
There is increasing interest in cumulative approaches to science, in which instead of analyzing t... more There is increasing interest in cumulative approaches to science, in which instead of analyzing the results of individual papers separately, we integrate information qualitatively or quantitatively. One such approach is meta-analysis, which has over 50 years of literature supporting its usefulness, and is becoming more common in cognitive science. However, changes in technical possibilities by the widespread use of Python and R make it easier to fit more complex models, and even simulate missing data. Here we recommend the use of mega-analyses (based on the aggregation of data sets collected by independent researchers) and hybrid meta-mega-analytic approaches, for cases where raw data is available for some studies. We illustrate the three approaches using a rich test-retest data set of infants' speech processing as well as synthetic data. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the three approaches from the viewpoint of a cognitive scientists contemplating their use, and limitations of this article, to be addressed in future work.
The Tungusic language family is comprised of languages spoken in Siberia, the Russian Far East, N... more The Tungusic language family is comprised of languages spoken in Siberia, the Russian Far East, Northeast China and Xinjiang. There is a general consensus that these languages are genealogically related and descend from a common ancestral language. Nevertheless, there is considerable disagreement with regard to the internal structure of the Tungusic family and the time depth of its separation into daughter languages. Here we use computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods to generate a phylogeny of Tungusic languages and estimate the time-depth of the family. Our analysis is based on the recently introduced Leipzig-Jakarta-Jena list, a dataset of 254 basic vocabulary items collected for 21 Tungusic doculects. Our results are consistent with two basic classifications previously proposed in the literature, notably a Manchu-Tungusic classification, in which the break-up of Jurchenic constitutes the first split in the tree, as well as a North-South classification, which includes a Jurch...
En esta Tesis se realiza un estudio pormenorizado de la dispersión inelástica profunda (DIS) de l... more En esta Tesis se realiza un estudio pormenorizado de la dispersión inelástica profunda (DIS) de leptones por mesones para acoplamiento fuerte y en el límite planar a partir de modelos duales basados en la correspondencia AdS/CFT. Se estudia la estructura de mesones escalares y mesones vectoriales en su polarización más general, con grados de libertad de sabor en el contexto de los modelos de D3D7-branas en la teoría de supercuerdas del tipo IIB y de D4D8D8- y D4D6D6-branas en la teoría de supercuerdas del tipo IIA. El primer caso se trata de una teoría de gauge en 3+1 dimensiones que preserva N = 2 supersimetrías, mientras que los últimos dos corresponden a teorías de Yang-Mills no supersimétricas. Se estudian los límites del parámetro de Bjorken x del orden de 1, que requiere de una descripción de supergravedad, y el límite x mucho menor que 1, para el cual los cálculos se deben hacer mediante la teoría de cuerdas. También se estudia la sección eficaz diferencial de dispersión en d...
Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019, 2019
Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcr... more Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcriptions from 600 language varieties from eleven language families around the world. This resource is designed to serve researchers in phonetics, phonology and related fields. Transcriptions follow new initiatives for standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the transcription datasets by phonetically-informed search and filtering, customise selections of languages and words, download any targeted data subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it through a custom URL. We present sample research applications based on our extensive coverage of regional and sociolinguistic variation within major languages, and also of endangered languages, for which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-to-hear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach tool, where speakers can instantaneously hear and compare the phonetic diversity and relationships of their native languages.
International Congress of Phonetic Sciences Full Papers, 2019
Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual
word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic
transcr... more Sound Comparisons hosts over 90,000 individual word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic transcriptions from 600 language varieties from eleven language families around the world. This resource is designed to serve researchers in phonetics, phonology and related fields. Transcriptions follow new initiatives for standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the transcription datasets by phonetically-informed search and filtering, customise selections of languages and words, download any targeted data subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it through a custom URL. We present sample research applications based on our extensive coverage of regional and sociolinguistic variation within major languages, and also of endangered languages, for which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-tohear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach tool, where speakers can instantaneously hear and compare the phonetic diversity and relationships of their native languages.
Uploads
word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic
transcriptions from 600 language varieties from
eleven language families around the world. This
resource is designed to serve researchers in
phonetics, phonology and related fields.
Transcriptions follow new initiatives for
standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At
soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the
transcription datasets by phonetically-informed
search and filtering, customise selections of
languages and words, download any targeted data
subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it
through a custom URL. We present sample research
applications based on our extensive coverage of
regional and sociolinguistic variation within major
languages, and also of endangered languages, for
which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first
documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The
multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-tohear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach tool,
where speakers can instantaneously hear and
compare the phonetic diversity and relationships of
their native languages.
word recordings and 50,000 narrow phonetic
transcriptions from 600 language varieties from
eleven language families around the world. This
resource is designed to serve researchers in
phonetics, phonology and related fields.
Transcriptions follow new initiatives for
standardisation in usage of the IPA and Unicode. At
soundcomparisons.com, users can explore the
transcription datasets by phonetically-informed
search and filtering, customise selections of
languages and words, download any targeted data
subset (sound files and transcriptions) and cite it
through a custom URL. We present sample research
applications based on our extensive coverage of
regional and sociolinguistic variation within major
languages, and also of endangered languages, for
which Sound Comparisons provides a rapid first
documentation of their diversity in phonetics. The
multilingual interface and user-friendly, ‘hover-tohear’ maps likewise constitute an outreach tool,
where speakers can instantaneously hear and
compare the phonetic diversity and relationships of
their native languages.