Journal
COGNITION
Volume 141, Issue -, Pages 87-102Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.03.016
Keywords
Cultural transmission; Language evolution; Iterated learning
Categories
Funding
- ESRC [RES-062-23-1537]
- AHRC [AH/F017677/1]
- Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/F017677/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/G010536/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- ESRC [ES/G010536/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Language exhibits striking systematic structure. Words are composed of combinations of reusable sounds, and those words in turn are combined to form complex sentences. These properties make language unique among natural communication systems and enable our species to convey an open-ended set of messages. We provide a cultural evolutionary account of the origins of this structure. We show, using simulations of rational learners and laboratory experiments, that structure arises from a trade-off between pressures for compressibility (imposed during learning) and expressivity (imposed during communication). We further demonstrate that the relative strength of these two pressures can be varied in different social contexts, leading to novel predictions about the emergence of structured behaviour in the wild. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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