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Language change and language evolution in the laboratory| old_uid | 6760 |
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| title | Language change and language evolution in the laboratory |
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| start_date | 2009/04/21 |
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| schedule | 15h45-17h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Big Conference Room (1.63) |
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| summary | Language is culturally transmitted: the language we speak is, at least in part, determined by the language we hear others produce. This means that language is an evolutionary system in its own right. I will present an experimental paradigm for studying the cultural evolution of language, and describe a series of experiments involving the iterated learning of artificial languages by human participants. In the first part of the talk I'll focus on a simple iterated learning experiment (developed in conjunction with Elizabeth Wonnacott, University of Oxford) which can be used to explore regularization and the elimination of unpredictable variation. In the second part of the talk I'll present further iterated learning experiments (carried out jointly with Simon Kirby and Hannah Cornish, University of Edinburgh) which show that basic structural properties of language can emerge through similar processes. Previous computational and mathematical models suggest that iterated learning provides an explanation for the structure of human language: our experimental work shows that the predictions of these models, and models of cultural evolution more generally, can be tested in the laboratory. |
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| responsibles | Zondervan |
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