Rick Dale: UC Merced

Human language is a flexible behavioral repertoire that may be finely tuned to our cognitive processes and social circumstances. I present evidence from three timescales that language may be shaped by a number of social and cognitive variables. These timescales include (i) how language is used in real-time human interaction, (ii) how language use may relate to the structure of social groups, and (iii) how slower-changing aspects of language, such as grammatical structure, may relate to large-scale demographic variables. I will then examine whether these relationships at different timescales provide hints of selection processes operating over language, and end with a new study demonstrating that, indeed, we can detect “echoes of selection” in large-scale vocabulary data.