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Main
Programme
Workshop description
Registration
Accomodation and Travel
Maps
Poster
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Programme (Printable version here).
Monday 12th July 2010
| 9:30 | REGISTRATION. Psychology building. |
| 9:50 | Welcome and Introduction. |
| 10:00 |  Bill Croft.
"An evolutionary model - NOT an analogy! - for language and culture" Background reading: Croft (2000)
Explaining language change: an evolutionary approach.
Harlow: Longman (Chapters 1 and 2).Baxter, Blythe, Croft & McKane (2009) Modeling language change: An evaluation of Trudgill's theory of
the emergence of New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change, 21:257-296. (Focus on pages
267-272). Download |
| 11:05 | Coffee. Psychology building (Basement Concourse) |
| 11:30 | 
Tom Griffiths. "Evolutionary dynamics and iterated learning" Background reading:
Griffiths, Kalish & Lewandowski (2008) Theoretical and
empirical evidence for the impact of inductive biases on cultural
evolution. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 363, 3503-3514. Download
Reali & Griffiths (2009) The evolution of frequency distribution: Relating regularization to inductive biases through iterated learning. Cognition 111, 317-328. Download
Reali & Griffiths (2010) Words as alleles: Connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to
models of genetic drift. Proc. R. Soc. B 227, 429-436. Download |
| 12:35 | Lunch. Psychology building (Basement Concourse) |
| 1.45 |  Alex Mesoudi. "The experimental study of human cultural
evolution"Background reading: Mesoudi,
Whiten & Laland (2006). Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. BBS, 29: 329-383.
Download
Mesoudi & Whiten (2008). The multiple roles of
cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B,
363:3489-3501. Download
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| 2:50 | Coffee. Psychology building (Basement Concourse) |
| 3:15 |  Kenny Smith. "Language change
and language evolution in the lab"Background
reading: Smith & Wonnacott (forthcoming). Eliminating unpredictable variation through iterated
learning. To appear in Cognition.Kirby, Cornish & Smith (2008). Cumulative cultural
evolution in the laboratory: an experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language.
PNAS, USA, 105: 10681-10686. Download
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| 4:20 | Coffee. Psychology building (Basement Concourse) |
| 4:45 | DISCUSSION SESSION. Commentator: Andrew Smith |
| 5:30 | End |
Tuesday 13th July 2010
| 10:00 |  Russell Gray.
"What do evolutionary biologists have to offer historical linguists?"
Abstract: Over the last two decades evolutionary biology has been revolutionised by the combined impact of
large databases and computational phylogenetic methods. In this talk I will explore the possible
benefits historical linguists might also derive from adopting web databases and phylogenetic
methods. I will emphasise that these technologies are supplements, rather than replacements, for
traditional linguistic scholarship.
Background reading: Gray, Drummond & Greenfield (2009) Language phylogenies reveal expansion
pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement. Science, 323(5913): 479 - 483.
Abstract
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| 11:05 | Coffee. Psychology building (Basement Concourse) |
| 11:30 | 
Simon Kirby. "The evolution of linguistic replicators"Background reading: Kirby, S. (in press). The Evolution of Linguistic Replicators. In Binder, P., & Smith, K. (eds). The Language Phenomenon. Springer. Download
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| 12:35 | Lunch. Psychology building (Basement Concourse) |
| 1:45 | 
Monica Tamariz. "Meaning as a selection pressure in the evolution of linguistic structure" Background reading:
Tamariz (2008) Exploring systematicity between phonological and context-cooccurrence representations of the mental lexicon. The Mental Lexicon, 3(2):259-278.
Download
Cornish, Tamariz & Kirby (2010) Complex adaptive systems and the origins of adaptive structure: what experiments can tell us. Special issue on Language as a complex Adaptive System.
Language Learning: 59:4S1.
Download |
| 2:50 | Coffee. Psychology building (Basement Concourse) |
| 3:15 | 
Gerhard Jaeger. "Evolution without replicators: George Price's 'General Theory of Selection'" Background reading: Jaeger (2008). Language evolution and George Price's "General
Theory of Selection" in R. Cooper and R. Kempson (eds.), Language in Flux: Dialogue Coordination, Language Variation, Change and Evolution, College Publications, 53-82. Download Clark (2010). Evolutionary frameworks for language change: The Price equation
approach. Language and linguistic compass 4/6: 363-376. Abstract
Additional reading: Price (1995) The nature of selection. J. Theor. Biol.
157:
389-396. Schwartz (2000) Death of an altruist: Was the man who found the selfless gene too good for this world?. Lingua franca 10(5). |
| 4:20 | Break (sorry, no coffee). Psychology building (Basement Concourse) |
| 4:45 | DISCUSSION SESSION. Commentator: Nicolas Claidiere. |
| 5:30 | End |
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