Week 8 reading

Iterated learning and the evolution of compositional structure

The plan for week 8

For our penultimate paper we’ll be reading Beckner et al. (2017), which provides a reanalysis and online replication of Experiment 2 of Kirby, Cornish & Smith (2008) - the 2008 paper started out as a Masters dissertation by Hannah Cornish (Dr Hannah Cornish these days), supervised by me and Simon Kirby. Beckner et al. start with a reanalysis of data from our paper, but the more relevant part here is their experiment, a large online iterated artificial language learning experiment. They find, as in the original experiment, that compositional structure develops through this iterated learning process.

As usual, in this week’s practical you’ll get a chance to look at a similar experiment in jsPsych, which will involve code from our earlier word learning experiment again but also the infrastructure to run an iterated learning design, which involves manipulating CSV files on the server.

Reading tasks for this week

Read:

A couple of things to note:

References

Kirby, S., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory:An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 105, 10681-10686.

Re-use

All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


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