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  1.  15
    Detecting Evolutionary Forces in Language Change.Mitchell Newberry, Ahern G., A. Christopher, Robin Clark & Joshua B. Plotkin - 2017 - Nature Publishing Group 551 (7679):223–226.
    Both language and genes evolve by transmission over generations with opportunity for differential replication of forms. The understanding that gene frequencies change at random by genetic drift, even in the absence of natural selection, was a seminal advance in evolutionary biology. Stochastic drift must also occur in language as a result of randomness in how linguistic forms are copied between speakers. Here we quantify the strength of selection relative to stochastic drift in language evolution. We use time series derived from (...)
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  2.  35
    A network of paths toward innovation.Jeremy A. Draghi & Joshua B. Plotkin - 2012 - Bioessays 34 (6):518-520.
  3.  15
    Drift as a Driver of Language Change: An Artificial Language Experiment.Rafael Ventura, Joshua B. Plotkin & Gareth Roberts - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (9):e13197.
    Over half a century ago, George Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to be older. Corpus studies since then have confirmed this pattern, with more frequent words being replaced and regularized less often than less frequent words. Two main hypotheses have been proposed to explain this: that frequent words change less because selection against innovation is stronger at higher frequencies, or that they change less because stochastic drift is stronger at lower frequencies. Here, we report the first experimental test (...)
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