Replication Data for: Phylogenetic signal in the lexicon: Are parental terms influenced by babytalk?

It has long been known that parental terms are poor indicators of shared genetic relationship because of their tendency to be influenced by features of “baby-talk”. However, change and stability of parental terms within language families has not been closely studied. Here I evaluate the stability of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ across three large language families. While terms which show features of child-directed speech do appear to show fewer signs of phylogenetic signal, very few of the results reach statistical significance. Though there is probably some influence of acquisition, it is not enough to swamp regular transmission and other processes of change. Therefore, while parental terms are inappropriate evidence for detecting remote relationships, such terms can be safely used in reconstruction. This dataset contains the fles needed to reproduce the study