*** two LEC talks next week, note slightly unusual starting time for both ***

Tue 17th June, 11.30-13.00, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

James Winters

Heuristic-driven strategies in communication games and their implications for the emergence of structure in language

So far, both communication game and iterated learning experiments have focused on macro-level properties and their transitions. This normally involves how we go from one system state (e.g., an initially random holistic language) to another system (e.g., systematic compositional languages). Less attention has been paid to the individual, local interactions in these experiments, such as usage events in communication games, and how they give rise to different types of structure. One useful avenue of exploration is consider the role of heuristics: experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. With this in mind, the first part of the talk will consider four very basic heuristics participants can employ in communication game experiments: copying, reuse, modification, and invention. By considering how these heuristics are influenced by different stressors, such as memory, learning bottlenecks and the communicative context, we can make predictions on the likelihood of transitioning from one system state to another. This leads into the second half of the talk where I will present ongoing work into an experimental test of one of these transitions: going from an initially compositional system to an underspecified language. Time permitting I will also discuss plans for future experiments.

Tue 17th June, 14.00-15.30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

Simon Kirby

Learning from learners: how social structure can shape linguistic structure

The cultural evolution of the basic design features of human language can be observed directly in the case of emerging sign languages. In particular, there are two broad contexts in which sign languages emerge: the deaf-community sign context, and the village sign context. The former involves deaf children being brought together in schools for the deaf, whereas the latter arises in typically rural communities with high rates of congenital deafness. Recent work in a particular sign language of the latter type, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign, reveals the evolution of a language lacking a fundamental design feature: duality of patterning.

In this talk, I will show using computational simulations (both Bayesian and connectionist) that we should expect the social context of an emerging language to have important consequences for the origins of structural design features such as duality of patterning. In particular, I will demonstrate that it is the school context that promotes the rapid evolution of systematicity at all levels in an emerging language.

I will also discuss the extent to which the very same underlying mechanisms can explain the apparent population-size/complexity correlations that have been found in the world’s spoken languages. I will tentatively conclude that it is not population size as such that is important for the emergence of systematicity, but rather the extent to which learners learn from other learners.

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