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YSM Issue 97.1

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CAN WE TRACE THE<br />

EVOLUTION OF SIGN<br />

LANGUAGE?<br />

&<br />

CAN NEMO COUNT?<br />

By Alex Dong & Malia Kuo<br />

Had Nemo’s siblings survived, maybe there would’ve<br />

been a fight for dominance over his anemone. Alas,<br />

we’ll never know.<br />

Nemo and his family are anemonefish, also known as clownfish,<br />

characterized by their unique white bar patterning and territorial<br />

behavior over their host anemones. Notably, the thirty identified<br />

anemonefish species have a different number of bars on their<br />

bodies, ranging from zero to three. In a recent study published<br />

in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Japanese researchers from<br />

the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology examined how<br />

anemonefish could use these bars to differentiate between species<br />

and identify potential intruders. Their question became, can<br />

anemonefish distinguish the number of bars on other individuals?<br />

The researchers presented —a species of<br />

anemonefish displaying three white bars—with four different<br />

fish models (zero, one, two, and three bars). attacked<br />

the three-bar model with a much higher frequency than any of<br />

the other models, suggesting that anemonefish count white bars<br />

to fend off primarily same-species competitors for their host<br />

anemone. These fish weren’t messing around: the alpha fish—<br />

the largest fish in the colony—battled eighty percent of threebarred<br />

fish for up to three seconds, and even stared down one<br />

intruder for eleven seconds.<br />

Coming next from Pixar: Fighting Nemo—Nemo engages in a<br />

scientifically accurate ninety-minute standoff against another<br />

three-barred clownfish. ■<br />

By Kelly Chen<br />

The use of hand gestures for communication has a long<br />

history, dating as far back as 5 B.C.E. in ancient Greece.<br />

Despite having existed for a long time, gestural signals,<br />

which would eventually become sign languages (SLs), have<br />

historically been less well documented than oral languages due<br />

to challenges with recording visual gestures and the lack of<br />

widely used written systems for SL.<br />

To address this, researchers created a computer program to trace<br />

the history of nineteen contemporary SLs. Signs corresponding to<br />

the same set of core vocabulary words were taken from each of<br />

these languages as the input data. Phonetic parameters and patterns<br />

of the signs such as handedness (one- or two-handed signs),<br />

handshape, location of the sign, and movement were encoded as<br />

metadata to be used for comparison between the languages.<br />

Using this program, the researchers separated SLs into two<br />

independent language families by region: European and Asian.<br />

A lack of historical reports corroborated the hypothesis that<br />

these two SL families had little to no influence on each other in<br />

the past. Some SLs within the European SL family were grouped<br />

into subfamilies consistent with geopolitical history, namely<br />

the central European subfamily and the Eastern European<br />

subfamily with ties to the history of the Russian Empire and the<br />

Soviet Union. The Asian SL family consisted of two subfamilies:<br />

Japanese/Taiwan and Chinese/Hong Kong SL. As seen above, the<br />

use of computational phylogenetic methods only foreshadows<br />

the discovery of more connections across the linguistic history<br />

of sign language. ■<br />

4 Yale Scientific Magazine March 2024 www.yalescientific.org

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