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  1. The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:e62.
    Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of Ai.Markus Dirk Dubber, Frank Pasquale & Sunit Das (eds.) - 2020 - Oxford Handbooks.
    This 44-chapter volume tackles a quickly-evolving field of inquiry, mapping the existing discourse as part of a general attempt to place current developments in historical context; at the same time, breaking new ground in taking on novel subjects and pursuing fresh approaches. The term "A.I." is used to refer to a broad range of phenomena, from machine learning and data mining to artificial general intelligence. The recent advent of more sophisticated AI systems, which function with partial or full autonomy and (...)
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  • Evolving artificial sign languages in the lab: From improvised gesture to systematic sign.Yasamin Motamedi, Marieke Schouwstra, Kenny Smith, Jennifer Culbertson & Simon Kirby - 2019 - Cognition 192 (C):103964.
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  • Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and the Principle of Least Effort: Language users optimise a miniature lexicon for efficient communication.Jasmeen Kanwal, Kenny Smith, Jennifer Culbertson & Simon Kirby - 2017 - Cognition 165 (C):45-52.
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  • Simplicity and Specificity in Language: Domain-General Biases Have Domain-Specific Effects.Jennifer Culbertson & Simon Kirby - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
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  • Self domestication and the evolution of language.James Thomas & Simon Kirby - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (1-2):9.
    We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis of language structure. If we think of language structure as reflecting an accumulated set of (...)
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  • The emergence of systematicity: How environmental and communicative factors shape a novel communication system.Jonas Nölle, Marlene Staib, Riccardo Fusaroli & Kristian Tylén - 2018 - Cognition 181 (C):93-104.
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  • The cognitive roots of regularization in language.Vanessa Ferdinand, Simon Kirby & Kenny Smith - 2019 - Cognition 184 (C):53-68.
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  • Compositional structure can emerge without generational transmission.Limor Raviv, Antje Meyer & Shiri Lev-Ari - 2019 - Cognition 182 (C):151-164.
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  • (1 other version)Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking.Maryia Fedzechkina, Elissa L. Newport & T. Florian Jaeger - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (2):416-446.
    Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages (...)
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  • From improvisation to learning: How naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution.Yasamin Motamedi, Lucie Wolters, Danielle Naegeli, Simon Kirby & Marieke Schouwstra - 2022 - Cognition 228 (C):105206.
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  • (1 other version)Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking.Maryia Fedzechkina, Elissa L. Newport & T. Florian Jaeger - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (6):n/a-n/a.
    Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing (...)
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  • The Cultural Evolution of Structured Languages in an Open‐Ended, Continuous World.W. Carr Jon, Smith Kenny, Cornish Hannah & Kirby Simon - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (4):892-923.
    Language maps signals onto meanings through the use of two distinct types of structure. First, the space of meanings is discretized into categories that are shared by all users of the language. Second, the signals employed by the language are compositional: The meaning of the whole is a function of its parts and the way in which those parts are combined. In three iterated learning experiments using a vast, continuous, open-ended meaning space, we explore the conditions under which both structured (...)
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  • The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Antonio Benítez-Burraco & Aleksey Nikolsky - 2023 - Human Nature 34 (2):229-275.
    Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, triggered by (...)
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  • Chunk‐Based Memory Constraints on the Cultural Evolution of Language.Erin S. Isbilen & Morten H. Christiansen - 2018 - Topics in Cognitive Science 12 (2):713-726.
    How linguistic structures evolve so as to become easier to process is addressed by Isbilen and Christiansen for the Now‐or‐Never bottleneck. The authors suggest that this fundamental challenge in language processing is coped with by rapid compression of the transient linguistic input into chunks then to be passed on. As linguistic structures that can be chunked more easily tend to stabilize and proliferate, language evolves to fit learners’ cognitive capabilities.
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  • Co‐Occurrence, Extension, and Social Salience: The Emergence of Indexicality in an Artificial Language.Aini Li & Gareth Roberts - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (5):e13290.
    We investigated the emergence of sociolinguistic indexicality using an artificial-language-learning paradigm. Sociolinguistic indexicality involves the association of linguistic variants with nonlinguistic social or contextual features. Any linguistic variant can acquire “constellations” of such indexical meanings, though they also exhibit an ordering, with first-order indices associated with particular speaker groups and higher-order indices targeting stereotypical attributes of those speakers. Much natural-language research has been conducted on this phenomenon, but little experimental work has focused on how indexicality emerges. Here, we present three (...)
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  • Word Meanings Evolve to Selectively Preserve Distinctions on Salient Dimensions.Catriona Silvey, Simon Kirby & Kenny Smith - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (1):212-226.
    Words refer to objects in the world, but this correspondence is not one-to-one: Each word has a range of referents that share features on some dimensions but differ on others. This property of language is called underspecification. Parts of the lexicon have characteristic patterns of underspecification; for example, artifact nouns tend to specify shape, but not color, whereas substance nouns specify material but not shape. These regularities in the lexicon enable learners to generalize new words appropriately. How does the lexicon (...)
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  • Production efficiency can cause grammatical change: Learners deviate from the input to better balance efficiency against robust message transmission.Masha Fedzechkina & T. Florian Jaeger - 2020 - Cognition 196 (C):104115.
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  • Cross-Linguistic Trade-Offs and Causal Relationships Between Cues to Grammatical Subject and Object, and the Problem of Efficiency-Related Explanations.Natalia Levshina - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12:648200.
    Cross-linguistic studies focus on inverse correlations (trade-offs) between linguistic variables that reflect different cues to linguistic meanings. For example, if a language has no case marking, it is likely to rely on word order as a cue for identification of grammatical roles. Such inverse correlations are interpreted as manifestations of language users’ tendency to use language efficiently. The present study argues that this interpretation is problematic. Linguistic variables, such as the presence of case, or flexibility of word order, are aggregate (...)
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  • Language Evolution Can Be Shaped by the Structure of the World.Amy Perfors & Daniel J. Navarro - 2014 - Cognitive Science 38 (4):775-793.
    Human languages vary in many ways but also show striking cross-linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical results demonstrate that Bayesian learners transmitting language to each other through iterated learning will converge on a distribution of languages that depends only on their prior biases about language and the quantity of data transmitted at each point; the structure of the world being communicated about plays no role (Griffiths & Kalish, , ). We revisit these findings and show that when (...)
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  • More than one way to see it: Individual heuristics in avian visual computation.Andrea Ravignani, Gesche Westphal-Fitch, Ulrike Aust, Martin M. Schlumpp & W. Tecumseh Fitch - 2015 - Cognition 143 (C):13-24.
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  • Acquiring and Producing Sentences: Whether Learners Use Verb-Specific or Verb-General Information Depends on Cue Validity.Malathi Thothathiri & Michelle G. Rattinger - 2016 - Frontiers in Psychology 7.
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  • Social biases modulate the loss of redundant forms in the cultural evolution of language.Gareth Roberts & Maryia Fedzechkina - 2018 - Cognition 171 (C):194-201.
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  • Predictability of meaning in grammatical encoding: Optional plural marking.Chigusa Kurumada & Scott Grimm - 2019 - Cognition 191 (C):103953.
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  • Interpreting Silent Gesture: Cognitive Biases and Rational Inference in Emerging Language Systems.Marieke Schouwstra, Henriëtte de Swart & Bill Thompson - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (7):e12732.
    Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent‐ordering patterns to indicate “who did what to whom,” yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language conventions, revealing apparent biases underpinning word order usage, based on the semantic properties of the information to be conveyed. We extend the scope of these studies by focusing, experimentally and computationally, on the interpretation (...)
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  • Interpreting Silent Gesture: Cognitive Biases and Rational Inference in Emerging Language Systems.Marieke Schouwstra, Henriëtte Swart & Bill Thompson - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (7):e12732.
    Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent‐ordering patterns to indicate “who did what to whom,” yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language conventions, revealing apparent biases underpinning word order usage, based on the semantic properties of the information to be conveyed. We extend the scope of these studies by focusing, experimentally and computationally, on the interpretation (...)
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  • A learning bias for word order harmony: Evidence from speakers of non-harmonic languages.Jennifer Culbertson, Julie Franck, Guillaume Braquet, Magda Barrera Navarro & Inbal Arnon - 2020 - Cognition 204 (C):104392.
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  • Children and Adults as Language Learners: Rules, Variation, and Maturational Change.Elissa L. Newport - 2020 - Topics in Cognitive Science 12 (1):153-169.
    Newport addresses a fundamental question in language learning: When, why, and how do learners come to form rules, given linguistic input that varies probabilistically? She presents several case studies that confirm and extend a long‐standing theme of her work: that young learners tend to form rules from variable input, whereas adult learners store and use its statistical probabilities. Thus, child and adult learners use quite different kinds of computations when learning language; the consequence is that operating on the very same (...)
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  • Neutralization and homophony avoidance in phonological learning.Sora Heng Yin & James White - 2018 - Cognition 179 (C):89-101.
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  • Adult Learning and Language Simplification.Mark Atkinson, Kenny Smith & Simon Kirby - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (8):2818-2854.
    Languages spoken in larger populations are relatively simple. A possible explanation for this is that languages with a greater number of speakers tend to also be those with higher proportions of non‐native speakers, who may simplify language during learning. We assess this explanation for the negative correlation between population size and linguistic complexity in three experiments, using artificial language learning techniques to investigate both the simplifications made by individual adult learners and the potential for such simplifications to influence group‐level language (...)
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  • Constructing Complexity in a Young Sign Language.Svetlana Dachkovsky, Rose Stamp & Wendy Sandler - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:347395.
    A universally acknowledged, core property of language is its complexity, at each level of structure – sounds, words, phrases, clauses, utterances, and higher levels of discourse. How does this complexity originate and develop in a language? We cannot fully answer this question from spoken languages, since they are all thousands of years old or descended from old languages. However, sign languages of deaf communities can arise at any time and provide empirical data for testing hypotheses related to the emergence of (...)
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  • How to Create Shared Symbols.Nicolas Fay, Bradley Walker, Nik Swoboda & Simon Garrod - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (S1):241-269.
    Human cognition and behavior are dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual-level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter-individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a referential communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of recurring meanings to a partner by drawing, but without using their conventional language. Individual-level learning, via observation and cognitive bias, was sufficient (...)
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  • The Relationship Between Artificial and Second Language Learning.Marc Ettlinger, Kara Morgan-Short, Mandy Faretta-Stutenberg & Patrick C. M. Wong - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (4):822-847.
    Artificial language learning experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we considered these questions by examining the relationship between performance in an ALL task and second language learning ability. Participants enrolled in a Spanish language class were evaluated using a number of (...)
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  • Structure emerges faster during cultural transmission in children than in adults.Vera Kempe, Nicolas Gauvrit & Douglas Forsyth - 2015 - Cognition 136:247-254.
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  • Greater learnability is not sufficient to produce cultural universals.Anna N. Rafferty, Thomas L. Griffiths & Marc Ettlinger - 2013 - Cognition 129 (1):70-87.
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  • The emergence of word-internal repetition through iterated learning: Explaining the mismatch between learning biases and language design.Mitsuhiko Ota, Aitor San José & Kenny Smith - 2021 - Cognition 210 (C):104585.
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  • Familiarity, consistency, and systematizing in morphology.R. Alexander Schumacher & Janet B. Pierrehumbert - 2021 - Cognition 212:104512.
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  • Eco-evo-devo and iterated learning: towards an integrated approach in the light of niche construction.José Segovia-Martín & Sergio Balari - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (4):1-23.
    In this paper we argue that ecological evolutionary developmental biology accounts of cognitive modernity are compatible with cultural evolution theories of language built upon iterated learning models. Cultural evolution models show that the emergence of near universal properties of language do not require the preexistence of strong specific constraints. Instead, the development of general abilities, unrelated to informational specificity, like the copying of complex signals and sharing of communicative intentions is required for cultural evolution to yield specific properties, such as (...)
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  • Network Connectivity Dynamics, Cognitive Biases, and the Evolution of Cultural Diversity in Round‐Robin Interactive Micro‐Societies.José Segovia-Martín, Bradley Walker, Nicolas Fay & Monica Tamariz - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (7):e12852.
    The distribution of cultural variants in a population is shaped by both neutral evolutionary dynamics and by selection pressures. The temporal dynamics of social network connectivity, that is, the order in which individuals in a population interact with each other, has been largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate how, in a fully connected social network, connectivity dynamics, alone and in interaction with different cognitive biases, affect the evolution of cultural variants. Using agent‐based computer simulations, we manipulate population connectivity dynamics (...)
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  • Object‐Label‐Order Effect When Learning From an Inconsistent Source.Timmy Ma & Natalia L. Komarova - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (8):e12737.
    Learning in natural environments is often characterized by a degree of inconsistency from an input. These inconsistencies occur, for example, when learning from more than one source, or when the presence of environmental noise distorts incoming information; as a result, the task faced by the learner becomes ambiguous. In this study, we investigate how learners handle such situations. We focus on the setting where a learner receives and processes a sequence of utterances to master associations between objects and their labels, (...)
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  • The basic reproductive ratio as a link between acquisition and change in phonotactics.Andreas Baumann & Nikolaus Ritt - 2018 - Cognition 176:174-183.
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  • Predictability and Variation in Language Are Differentially Affected by Learning and Production.Aislinn Keogh, Simon Kirby & Jennifer Culbertson - 2024 - Cognitive Science 48 (4):e13435.
    General principles of human cognition can help to explain why languages are more likely to have certain characteristics than others: structures that are difficult to process or produce will tend to be lost over time. One aspect of cognition that is implicated in language use is working memory—the component of short‐term memory used for temporary storage and manipulation of information. In this study, we consider the relationship between working memory and regularization of linguistic variation. Regularization is a well‐documented process whereby (...)
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  • Why do languages tolerate heterography? An experimental investigation into the emergence of informative orthography.Jon W. Carr & Kathleen Rastle - 2024 - Cognition 249 (C):105809.
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  • From One Bilingual to the Next: An Iterated Learning Study on Language Evolution in Bilingual Societies.Pauline Palma, Sarah Lee, Vegas Hodgins & Debra Titone - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (5):e13289.
    Studies of language evolution in the lab have used the iterated learning paradigm to show how linguistic structure emerges through cultural transmission—repeated cycles of learning and use across generations of speakers. However, agent-based simulations suggest that prior biases crucially impact the outcome of cultural transmission. Here, we explored this notion through an iterated learning study of English-French bilingual adults (mostly sequential bilinguals dominant in English). Each participant learned two unstructured artificial languages in a counterbalanced fashion, one resembling English, another resembling (...)
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  • Category Clustering and Morphological Learning.John Mansfield, Carmen Saldana, Peter Hurst, Rachel Nordlinger, Sabine Stoll, Balthasar Bickel & Andrew Perfors - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (2):e13107.
    Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.
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  • Drift as a Driver of Language Change: An Artificial Language Experiment.Rafael Ventura, Joshua B. Plotkin & Gareth Roberts - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (9):e13197.
    Over half a century ago, George Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to be older. Corpus studies since then have confirmed this pattern, with more frequent words being replaced and regularized less often than less frequent words. Two main hypotheses have been proposed to explain this: that frequent words change less because selection against innovation is stronger at higher frequencies, or that they change less because stochastic drift is stronger at lower frequencies. Here, we report the first experimental test (...)
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