LEC meeting 16th April: talk by Hannah Cornish

Systematicity is a basic property of language, and many other culturally transmitted behaviours. In this talk, which is an extension to the one I gave at EHBEA, I will first present results from an iterated learning experiment that shows how initially independent sequence learning trials can gradually become systematic via cultural transmission, and then try to link what we discover about this simple non-linguistic system back into other domains. The (at this point, tentative) idea that I would like to put forward is that systematicity is an inevitable byproduct of cultural evolution acting cumulatively on very basic learning mechanisms, and that this relationship perhaps holds both ways: where we see systematicty in the (behavioural) world, we might also expect to find evidence of some kind of cultural evolutionary process that put it there.