Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction?
Luise Häuser Gerhard Jäger Taraka Rama Johann-Mattis List Alexandros Stamatakis
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.