Tuesday 22nd October, 11-12.30, B21 7 George Square

Model Fitting and Prediction for Language Evolution: Quirks and Opportunities
Bill Thompson

Questions concerning the origins of linguistic structures are increasingly being studied by means of artificial language learning experiments. Central to this enterprise is the drive to uncover cognitive biases that shape the evolution of linguistic systems. A particularly promising growth area in this field is the use of cognitive model fitting techniques. In this talk I’ll argue that, perhaps unlike comparable topics in cognitive science, questions of language evolution must be seen in the light of cultural evolution. This feature at once poses potentially unique difficulties and exciting opportunities in experimental design and model fitting. I’ll consider several techniques that may help maximise confidence in the inferences we can draw, from experimental data, about language learning biases and their consequences for population-level linguistic phenomena. In particular I hope to show that the quirks of studying a culturally learned behaviour, and the opportunities to make predictions about culture by harnessing information in experimental learning data, are served equally by the same approach.

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