Language Evolution: CENA
Collaboration with: Anderson Almeida da Silva (Universidade Federal do Delta do Parnaíba), Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT and University of São Paulo), and Vitor Nóbrega (University of Hamburg)
CENA is an emergent sign language in Piauí, Brasil, that arose out of a homesign system some 70 years ago (Almeida da Silva & Nevins 2020). We are working on a joint research project to show that (i) humans do not need an external model of language, but can instead devise one of their own (an argument already made by Goldin-Meadow and colleagues in their work on homesign, see for example Brentari & Goldin-Meadow 2017), and (ii) that a homesign system can quickly progress into a full-fledged sign language if there is a community that uses it. While similar arguments have been made on the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, we argue that CENA is different because it was not subject to any outside influences during its genesis due to the fact that it arose in a remote village with no access to other sign languages or sign language educators.
Combinatorial Structures in Animal Communication
Collaboration with: Alexandra Bosshard, Balthasar Bickel (UZH & NCCR)
We are working on new ways to infer combinatorial structures in animal communication systems in an unsupervised manner.