In this lecture I’ll pick up the thread started by Marieke, and discuss how a symbolic, phonemic, compositional language can emerge from a protolanguage which lacks some or all of these features, simply as a result of cultural transmission: of the language being passed from person to person. Marieke introduced this idea in connection to Simon Kirby’s computer simulation work from the early 2000s; in this lecture I am going to focus on experimental paradigms (mainly with humans) that we have developed here at Edinburgh, illustrating the same ideas.
I’d like you to read two short journal articles: our original paper on iterated artificial language learning, and our recent review article touching on simulation models, mathematical models, and experiments. If you’d like some fun videos to watch, you can check out the Horizon episode “Why do we talk?” – the whole thing is on YouTube, but part 6 includes a mocked-up (slightly inaccurate) for-TV enactment of Experiment 2 from our 2008 paper (and part 4 details a similar experiment run in zebra finches by Olga Feher, who is now working on humans with me). 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.
Once you have done the reading, don’t forget to do the post-reading, pre-lecture quiz, now available on Learn.