Cultural evolution of language
As usual, read this blog, do the reading, and then take the quiz on Top Hat to test your understanding.
In this lecture I’ll discuss how a symbolic, phonemic, compositional language can emerge as a result of cultural transmission (providing a reminder and a bit more detail on stuff I said in week 1, and focussing on experimental paradigms we pioneered here in Edinburgh), and link this to the process of grammaticalisation studied in historical linguistics.
I’d like you to read two short journal articles: Kirby, Cornish & Smith (2008), which was our original paper on iterated artificial language learning (you may well already have read it, we are pleased with it so set it as reading all over the place), and Smith (2022), a short review article summarising the key ideas in this literature. If you’d like some fun videos to watch, you can check out the Horizon episode “Why do we talk?” – the whole thing used to be on YouTube but has now been removed, so you can check it out on Learn. Jump to 50:27 to see a mocked-up (slightly inaccurate) for-TV re-enactment of Experiment 2 from our 2008 paper, and jump back to 36:50 for a similar experiment run in zebra finches by Dr Olga Fehér. Or you can see me (and Suilin Lavelle) banging on about cultural evolution (and beavers, for reasons that now escape me) in an online lecture on YouTube we filmed back in the day.
Smith, K. (2022). How language learning and language use create linguistic structure. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31, 177-186. You will need to be on the University network to access this, or you can look at a less prettily-formatted preprint.
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