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The cultural evolution of language in the lab

The cultural evolution of language in the lab. Kenny Smith Department of Psychology Northumbria University. The general approach. Language is socially-learned  Languages evolve to facilitate their transmission Consequences: Adaptation to biases of language learners

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The cultural evolution of language in the lab

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  1. The cultural evolution of language in the lab Kenny Smith Department of Psychology Northumbria University

  2. The general approach Language is socially-learned Languages evolve to facilitate their transmission Consequences: • Adaptation to biases of language learners • Adaptation to other pressures (e.g. poverty of the stimulus) Structural properties of language not necessarily hard-wired into language learners (Implications for brain stuff later)

  3. Language learning in context A question: how do the kinds of languages we see in populations relate to the individual-level processes of learning and production? utterances Learning grammar Production utterances grammar utterances grammar

  4. One way to address these questions Mathematical/computational modelling • Build models of the processes of learning and production • With known biases • Build a population model • A chain, a series of non-overlapping generations, … • Run it • How do the biases of individuals influence the structure of the languages that develop in these populations? • Can other things (e.g. amount of data you see, frequency, structure of population you are in, …) have an impact?

  5. Another way Do the same thing in the lab • Artificial language learning • Participants attempt to learn a simple target language • Diffusion chain methodology • Participant n’s produced language becomes training data for n+1 Two areas of current work • Elimination of unpredictable variation • Smith & Wonnacott, forthcoming, Cognition • Creation of structure

  6. An observation: languages are structured Languages contain generalizable structure • This allows learners to learn a large system after exposure to only part of it Why is language like this? Can structure emerge from transmission? • Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008, PNAS

  7. An artificial language learning experiment • 27 pictures • 3 colours, 3 shapes, 3 movements • Adult participant repeatedly trained on labels for subsetof 13 • Tested on all 27 pictures • Learners required to generalize • Poverty of stimulus problem

  8. Iterated Learning picture-label pairs Learner 1 Evolution? picture-label pairs Learner 2 picture-label pairs Learner 3

  9. A random initial language

  10. A 9th generation language

  11. Why is it becoming more structured? • Language finds a structural generalization which allows it to be learned and transmitted • Compositionality • Given different transmission pressures, you get different structures • E.g. systematic underspecification (ambiguity) • Structure potentially emerges through cultural (as opposed to biological) evolutionary processes • Our participants already know stuff about how languages should work • But models illustrate same effects in populations of learners lacking these biases

  12. Implications Because language is socially learned • It evolves • It probably adapts to us faster than we adapt to it • Its structure probably reflects (weak) biases of domain-general learning mechanisms • I would expect high overlap between brain regions / processes for language and related non-linguistic tasks

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