Language adapts: exploring the cultural dynamics of iterated learning

Abstract

Human languages are not just tools for transmitting cultural ideas, they are themselves culturally transmitted. This single observation has major implications for our understanding of how and why languages around the world are structured the way they are, and also for how scientists should be studying them. Accounting for the origins of what turns out to be such a uniquely human ability is, and should be, a priority for anyone interested in what makes us different from every other lifeform on Earth. The way the scientific community thinks about language has seen considerable changes over the years. In particular, we have witnessed movements away from a purely descriptive science of language, towards a more explanatory framework that is willing to embrace the difficult questions of not just how individual languages are currently structured and used, but also how and why they got to be that way in the first place. Seeing languages as historical entities is, of course, nothing new in linguistics. Seeing languages as complex adaptive systems, undergoing processes of evolution at multiple levels of interaction however, is. Broadly speaking, this thesis explores some of the implications that this perspective on language has, and argues that in addition to furthering our understanding of the processes of biological evolution and the mechanisms of individual learning required specifically for language, we also need to be mindful of the less well-understood cultural processes that mediate between the two. Human communication systems are not just direct expressions of our genes. Neither are they independently acquired by learners anew at every generation. Instead, languages are transmitted culturally from one generation to another, creating an opportunity for a different kind of evolutionary channel to exist. It is a central aim of this thesis to explore some of the adaptive dynamics that such a cultural channel has, and investigate the extent to which certain structural and statistical properties of language can be directly explained as adaptations to the transmission process and the learning biases of speakers. In order to address this aim, this thesis takes an experimental approach. Building on a rich set of empirical results from various computational simulations and mathematical models, it presents a novel methodological framework for exploring one type of cultural transmission mechanism, iterated learning, in the laboratory using human participants. In these experiments, we observe the evolution of artificial languages as they are acquired and then transmitted to new learners. Although there is no communication involved in these studies, and participants are unaware that their learning efforts are being propagated to future learners, we find that many functional features of language emerge naturally from the different constraints imposed upon them during transmission. These constraints can take a variety of forms, both internal and external to the learner. Taken collectively, the data presented here suggest several points: (i) that iterated language learning experiments can provide us with new insights about the emergence and evolution of language; (ii) that language-like structure can emerge as a result of cultural transmission alone; and (iii) that whilst structure in these systems has the appearance of design, and is in some sense ‘created’ by intentional beings, its emergence is in fact wholly the result of non-intentional processes. Put simply, cultural evolution plays a vital role in language. This work extends our framework for understanding it, and offers a new method for investigating it.