title: Building social cognitive models of language change.
abstract: Studies of language change have begun to contribute to answering several pressing questions in cognitive sciences, including the origins of human language capacity, the social construction of cognition and the mechanisms underlying culture change in general. Here, we describe recent advances within a new emerging framework for the study of language change, one that models such change as an evolutionary process among competing linguistic variants. We argue that a crucial and unifying element of this framework is the use of probabilistic, data-driven models both to infer change and to compare competing claims about social and cognitive influences on language change.
authors.affiliation: School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, PO Box 872402, Tempe, AZ 85287-2402, USA. Daniel.Hruschka@asu.edu
authors.forename: Daniel J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Hruschka
authors.forename: Morten H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Christiansen
authors.forename: Richard A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Blythe
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Croft
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Heggarty
authors.forename: Salikoko S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Mufwene
authors.forename: Janet B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Pierrehumbert
authors.forename: Shana
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Poplack
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008960:Models, Psychological; D012919:Social Behavior