Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction?
This addresses the challenge of improving phylogenetic methods for linguists, but it is incremental as it tests existing ideas with new data.
The paper tackled the problem of phylogenetic reconstruction in linguistics by comparing sound-based and cognate-based approaches, finding that cognate-based phylogenies were about one-third closer to gold standard trees on average.
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.