Sascha Wolfer

Als ich die Wahlkabine gesehen hab, war ich voll traurig, dass ich vorsorglich Briefwahl gemacht hab.

Damn! Friedemann Pulvermüller was one of the most influental researchers for me during my time in the psycholinguistic research lab at the U Freiburg. It‘s very sad to hear about this great loss to the whole linguistic research community. 😞

Es ist zumindest keine Website eines deutschen Hotels... inhaltlich gebe ich Dir vollumfänglich recht!

A gender selection menu from a hotel website showing the options Fräulein, Professor(-in), Herr, Frau, and Doktor.

Ah, yes, the five genders!

The "significant" in this quote should be "important", sorry.

Schon mal nen kleiner Teaser - die neue Version von #OWIDplusLIVE ist seit ein paar Tagen online (demnächst mehr). Wir (zusammen mit @sascha-wolfer.bsky.social) erfassen seit 2020 tagesaktuell token, bi- und trigrammen in ausgewählten deutschsprachigen RSS-Feeds. www.owid.de/plus/live-20...

Baby-Boomer – Wikipedia

Ich glaube, dass ist ein klassischer Fuzzy-Boundaries-Effekt. Wenn man diese Übersicht ernst nimmt (de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby-Bo...), liegen heute 60-Jährige an der Grenze zw. Boomern und Gen X. Ist bei mir ein ähnliches "Problem". Mit Jahrgang 1981 bin ich irgendwo zw. Gen X und Millenials. 🤷‍♂️

Word.

Welche Bezeichnungen genau gibt es für ältere Menschen nicht? Jene mit griechischen Buchstaben? Andere Bezeichnungen gibt es ja durchaus: Generation Silent/Weltkriegsgeneration, Boomer, X, Y, Z. Vermutlich sind halt einfach die Buchstaben des lateinischen Alphabets ausgegangen 😉

In other words: we model relationships – Xia & Lindell summarise them into one number per language.

The real test is whether a mixed model that explicitly represents phylogeny and geography performs worse than their alternative, where the entire shared history of languages and environments is effectively collapsed into a single dimension (an eigenvector).

So while Xia & Lindell insist that "autocorrelation due to relationships and distance cannot be captured in family or regional-level analyses", we see that as an empirical question – and we treated it as one.

The outcome is well aligned with genealogy, showing that family membership captures someth genuinely informative about the process. When the model finds that family explains a large share of the variance, that's not a failure–it's evidence that phylogenetic structure dominates the pattern.

Finally, what Xia & Lindell call a "separation problem" is, in our view, a feature of our approach and not a bug.

If, e.g., all languages in a family are polysynthetic (or none are), that’s not a statistical artefact – it’s the signal.

A negative global association arises because polysynth lang are concentrated in regions with smaller overall populations, even though within regions the relationsh is positive. Once we account for that structure—as our mixed logit models do—the supposed "global" negative effect reverses direction.

However, if we compare within each of these three regions, polysynthetic languages have a higher median L1_population size than non-polysynthetic ones. Might this pattern point towards a classic Simpson's paradox?

Eyeballing Figure 1 of their response actually seems to support this: the three subregions in the Americas contain nearly 80 % of all polysynthetic languages. In each of them, the median population size lies below the global median.

... not one to be decided by assertion. Take, for instance, our finding that once random effects for either subregion or language family are included, the estimated effect of L1_population reverses direction—from the negative value reported by Xia & Lindell et al. to a positive one.

... we don't think it's correct, as Xia & Lindell assert, to just claim that our results are "counterintuitive", the fix-eff estimts are "unreliable" and that the high model fits are "unrealistic." Whether a mix model better captures the data-generat. process is ultimately an empirical question, ...

... showing that in their re-analysis the PIPs for Small_Family (0.085 and 0.300) are clearly reduced.

One other thing, while we don't claim that our mixed-effects logit model is the perfect way to account for non-independence between languages, ...

And btw: it's not enough to simply subtract 0.5 from their original PIP values to make them comparable to the 0–1 scale used in the response. The difference must also be divided by (1 – 0.5). Correctly scaled, the original PIPs are 0.114 (for Polysynthesis) and 0.588 (for Extended), ...

... how this could be taken as support for their earlier statement that "different measures of language isolation – social, physical and *phylogenetic* – are *significant* predictors of polysynthesis."

... the variable is rarely included in the best-supported models and its estimated effect is highly uncertain – essentially indistinguishable from zero. We therefore still struggle to see ...

In the Polysynthesis analysis, Small_Family has a minuscule averaged effect estimate (0.02) with a standard error more than four times larger (0.085). Together with a posterior inclusion probability (PIP) of just 0.085, this means ...

Xia & Lindell have also published a response (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) – unsurprisingly, we don’t agree with most of their arguments. What puzzles us most is their claim that the re-analysis (their Table 1) "strengthens [their] conclusions." On the contrary:

Statistical errors undermine claims about the evolution of polysynthetic languages | PNAS Statistical errors undermine claims about the evolution of polysynthetic languages

Out now in PNAS: Statistical errors undermine claims about the evolution of #polysynthetic #languages by Alex Koplenig and me: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

This is a comment on Bromham et al.'s doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

#linguistics 🧶 coming up...

rude!

The application period for the EMJM- #EMLex Master Programme (European Master in Lexicography) is now open.

Submit your applications via the following link:
emlex.eu.usc.gal/web/applicat...

Applications for the Erasmus Mundus scholarship are open until February 2, 2026 (inclusive).

From the interestingasfuck community on Reddit: An A.I company just spent $1 million+ on print advertising in nyc, one of the biggest campaigns ever done.. only for it to be immediately graffitied by ... Explore this post and more from the interestingasfuck community

🤷‍♂️

www.reddit.com/r/interestin...

„Maßnahmen zur Betriebsstabilisierung“ als Verspätungsgrund ist jetzt aber auch neu für mich.