2024/02/05 by Luise Häuser, Gerhard Jäger, Häuser, Luise +7 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.02807
openalex publication_date 2024/02/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not taken this potential into account. Most computational studies still rely on lexical cognates as major data source for phylogenetic reconstruction in linguistics, although there do exist a few studies in which authors praise the benefits of comparing words at the level of sound sequences. Building on (a) ten diverse datasets from different language families, and (b) state-of-the-art methods for automated cognate and sound correspondence detection, we test, for the first time, the performance of sound-based versus cognate-based approaches to phylogenetic reconstruction. Our results show that phylogenies reconstructed from lexical cognates are topologically closer, by approximately one third with respect to the generalized quartet distance on average, to the gold standard phylogenies than phylogenies reconstructed from sound correspondences.