Cultural evolution of language
As usual, read this blog, do the reading, and then take the quiz on Learn 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 want a video to watch you could watch Simon Kirby’s inaugural lecture from 2011 (an inaugural lecture is a sort of celebration-and-career-review public talk you give after being made a full professor), or mine from 2018.
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.
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.