Experimental modelling of the cultural evolution of language

HF-217, 14.15-16.00

The field of language evolution is relatively new, but has been developing very quickly during the last decades. The basic questions of this highly interdisciplinary field are: how did language emerge, how did it acquire the structure it has, and what are the most general patterns of its change. One of the promising approaches to the latter two questions is the cultural evolution framework which views language as a complex adaptive system. In other words, as language is transmitted over generations or used for communication, it evolves and adapts to environmental pressures. It is hypothesized that many properties of linguistic structure (including the fundamental ones such as compositionality, duality of patterning, recursive syntax etc.) can be explained as outcomes of this cultural evolution.

We have little opportunity to study cultural evolution by direct observation, so the approach has to rely heavily on models. Until recently, those were only computational and mathematical models, but a few years ago a powerful method of performing experiments with human subjects was introduced (Kirby et al. 2008). I will be speaking about most recent advances achieved using this method, including my own work.

Reference:

Kirby, S., Smith, K., and Cornish, H. (2008) Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: an experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(31), 10681–10686.