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      Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures

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          Abstract

          Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation, demonstrating that in the absence of words people can use vocalizations to communicate a variety of meanings.

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          brms: An R Package for Bayesian Multilevel Models Using Stan

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            The weirdest people in the world?

            Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
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              On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: a meta-analysis.

              A meta-analysis examined emotion recognition within and across cultures. Emotions were universally recognized at better-than-chance levels. Accuracy was higher when emotions were both expressed and recognized by members of the same national, ethnic, or regional group, suggesting an in-group advantage. This advantage was smaller for cultural groups with greater exposure to one another, measured in terms of living in the same nation, physical proximity, and telephone communication. Majority group members were poorer at judging minority group members than the reverse. Cross-cultural accuracy was lower in studies that used a balanced research design, and higher in studies that used imitation rather than posed or spontaneous emotional expressions. Attributes of study design appeared not to moderate the size of the in-group advantage.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                cwiek@leibniz-zas.de
                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2045-2322
                12 May 2021
                12 May 2021
                2021
                : 11
                : 10108
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.473828.2, ISNI 0000 0004 0561 5872, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, ; 10117 Berlin, Germany
                [2 ]GRID grid.7468.d, ISNI 0000 0001 2248 7639, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, , Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, ; 10099 Berlin, Germany
                [3 ]GRID grid.5252.0, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 973X, Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, , Ludwig Maximilian University, ; 80799 Munich, Germany
                [4 ]GRID grid.10939.32, ISNI 0000 0001 0943 7661, Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, , University of Tartu, ; 50090 Tartu, Estonia
                [5 ]GRID grid.72960.3a, ISNI 0000 0001 2188 0906, Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage UMR 5596, , Université Lumière Lyon 2, ; 69363 Lyon, France
                [6 ]GRID grid.7737.4, ISNI 0000 0004 0410 2071, Department of Digital Humanities, , University of Helsinki, ; 00014 Helsinki, Finland
                [7 ]GRID grid.26091.3c, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9959, The Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, , Keio University, ; Mita Minatoku, Tokyo, 108-8345 Japan
                [8 ]GRID grid.7491.b, ISNI 0000 0001 0944 9128, Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, , Bielefeld University, ; 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
                [9 ]GRID grid.14003.36, ISNI 0000 0001 2167 3675, Department of Psychology, , University of Wisconsin-Madison, ; Madison, WI 53706 USA
                [10 ]GRID grid.258676.8, ISNI 0000 0004 0532 8339, Department of English Language and Literature, , Konkuk University, ; Seoul, 05029 South Korea
                [11 ]GRID grid.251844.e, ISNI 0000 0001 2226 7265, Asian Studies Program, , Agnes Scott College, ; Decatur, GA 30030 USA
                [12 ]GRID grid.462776.6, ISNI 0000 0001 2206 2382, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, , Laboratoire Parole et Langage, UMR 7309, ; 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France
                [13 ]GRID grid.4444.0, ISNI 0000 0001 2112 9282, Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, UMR 7018, , CNRS & Sorbonne Nouvelle, ; 75005 Paris, France
                [14 ]GRID grid.10825.3e, ISNI 0000 0001 0728 0170, Department of Language and Communication, , University of Southern Denmark, ; 5230 Odense, Denmark
                [15 ]Department of Phonetics, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest, 1068 Hungary
                [16 ]GRID grid.411781.a, ISNI 0000 0004 0471 9346, School of Health Sciences, Department of Speech and Language Therapy, , Istanbul Medipol University, ; 34810 Istanbul, Turkey
                [17 ]GRID grid.16463.36, ISNI 0000 0001 0723 4123, School of Arts, Linguistics Discipline, , University of KwaZulu-Natal, ; Durban, 4041 South Africa
                [18 ]GRID grid.6572.6, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 7486, Department of English Language & Linguistics, , University of Birmingham, ; Birmingham, B15 2TT UK
                Article
                89445
                10.1038/s41598-021-89445-4
                8115676
                33980933
                c70c3dce-10cd-4d93-a59c-137eeb995eaa
                © The Author(s) 2021

                Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 8 February 2021
                : 27 April 2021
                Funding
                Funded by: Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) (4531)
                Categories
                Article
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2021

                Uncategorized
                psychology,evolution of language
                Uncategorized
                psychology, evolution of language

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