Two of the major assumptions that statistical tests make (random sampling, distribution of the data) are not tenable for most typological data. We suggest to use randomization tests, which avoid these assumptions. Randomization is applicable to frequency data, rank data, scalar measurements and ratings, so most typological data can be analyzed with the same tools. We provided a free computer pr...

This study applies the observation of alignment between geographical watersheds and linguistic groupings to the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas. Tournadre (2014) estimates 220 Tibetic language varieties in 25 major groupings, sharing a common linguistic ancestry. Typological groupings can be readily identified through mapping human settlements to watersheds. For areas that have yet to be rese...

We present the goals and architecture of the Typological Database System, a project for the creation of a unified interface to numerous independently developed typological databases. The aim of the project is to develop a software system that allows a user to simultaneously query different databases through a single interface. The challenge of the project lies in the variability of the included...

However, this can be done by means of a relatively simple and feasible technique that may significantly increase the linguistic value of statistical typological observations. The basic idea is very simple: what we need is a representative sample of pairs of closely related languages (with a roughly similar time of divergence). This gives us an additional statistic, the frequency h of divergent ...

Developing a unified interface for typological databases with diverse theoretical perspectives of certain crosslinguistic phenomena poses problems for ontology-mediated integration, where multiple potentially theory-specific concepts need to be associated. This paper outlines a bidirectional approach to unbiased domain conceptualization and unification of database notions. At the global level, ...

Several investigations report a positive effect of childhood bilingualism on executive control (EC). An issue that has remained largely unexamined is the role of the typological distance between the languages spoken by bilinguals. In the present study we focus on children who grow up with Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek, two closely related varieties that differ from each other on all l...

Utilizing corpora to build morphological analyzers for the purposes of computational application has been addressed in many different ways. Methods for automated morphological analysis generally focus on segmentation from raw text, and ignore the actual learning of what morpheme features are present. Other methods are time-consuming and require a great deal of prior knowledge of the language su...