Detecting regular sound changes in linguistics as events of concerted evolution.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Concerted evolution is normally used to describe parallel changes at different sites in a genome, but it is also observed in languages where a specific phoneme changes to the same other phoneme in many words in the lexicon—a phenomenon known as regular sound change. We develop a general statistical model that can detect concerted changes in aligned sequence data and apply it to study regular sound changes in the Turkic language family.

Results

Linguistic evolution, unlike the genetic substitutional process, is dominated by events of concerted evolutionary change. Our model identified more than 70 historical events of regular sound change that occurred throughout the evolution of the Turkic language family, while simultaneously inferring a dated phylogenetic tree.

SUBMITTER: Hruschka DJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4291143 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature