Adults are more efficient in creating and transmitting novel signalling systems than children

Abstract

children Acknowledgement:We gratefully acknowledge funding of a research visit to the Language and Cognition Group of the Max-Planck-Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, which supported the writing of this paper, and helpful discussions with Limor Raviv, Mark Dingemanse, Monica Tamariz, Seán Roberts and Stephen Levinson. We also wish to express our gratitude to Arduthie Primary School and Mill O'Forest Primary School, Stonehaven, for their support in running the experiments.Language transmission in adults and children 2 AbstractIterated language learning experiments have shown that meaningful and structured signalling systems emerge when there is pressure for signals to be both learnable andexpressive. Yet such experiments have mainly been conducted with adults using language-like signals. Here we explore whether structured signalling systems can also emerge when signalling domains are unfamiliar and when the learners are children with their well-attested cognitive and pragmatic limitations. In Experiment 1, we compared iterated learning of binary auditory sequences denoting small sets of meanings in chains of adults and 5-7-year old children. Signalling systems became more learnable even though iconicity and structure did not emerge despite applying a homonymy filter designed to keep the systems expressive. When the same types of signals were used in referential communication by adult and child dyads in Experiment 2, only the adults, but not the children, were able to negotiate shared iconic and structured signals. Referential communication using their native language by 4-5-year old children in Experiment 3 showed that only interaction with adults, but not with peers resulted in informative expressions. These findings suggest that emergence and transmission of communication systems is unlikely to be driven by children, and point to the importance of cognitive maturity and pragmatic expertise of learners as well as feedback-based scaffolding of communicative effectiveness by experts during language evolution.

Amount of Learning and Signal Stability Modulate Emergence of Combinatorial Structure and Iconicity in Novel Signaling Systems

“…This level of structure is referred to as combinatorial structure and is assumed to arise from cognitive biases that favor reuse and modification of learned building blocks (Roberts & Galantucci, 2012, Verhoef et al, 2014. Iterated language learning experiments have explored a variety of signaling spaces such as sequences of letters (Kirby et al, 2008;, Carr et al, 2017Cornish et al, 2017), syllables , colors (Cornish et al, 2013), tones (Kempe et al, 2019) as well as drawn squiggles , tracings on a continuously moving pad (Galantucci, Kroos & Rhodes;, abstract graphical forms called Ferros (Cuskley, 2019), whistled pitch contours (Verhoef et al, 2014;, and manual gestures (Motamedi et al, 2019). These experiments have shown that both inter-generational transmission (Verhoef et al 2014) and referential communication (Little et al, 2017), can lead to the emergence of combinatorial structure.…”

“…More generally, such non-arbitrary relationships involve a degree of homeomorphism between the topologies of the signal and meaning spaces (Little et al, 2017b), a relationship that has also been termed relative iconicity. For example, both in natural languages and in artificial signaling systems longer signals tend to be associated with bigger referents or more complex meanings (Lewis & Frank, 2016, Little et al, 2017Kempe et al, 2019). Furthermore, words with similar sounds tend to have similar meanings (Monaghan et al, 2014;Tamariz, 2008), and letters with similar shapes tend to map onto similar sounds (Jee, Tamariz & Shillcock, under review).…”

“…drawings or gestures, absolute iconicity can emerge right from the start (Fay et al, 2014a,b;Motamedi et al, 2019), and the iconic signals subsequently become simplified and conventionalized with repeated use (Lister & Fay, 2017). For other signaling systems like Leap Motion (Little et al, 2017) or binary tone sequences (Kempe et al, 2019), where physical resemblance between signal and meaning space is limited, emergence of relative iconicity requires transmission over several generations as it takes time for users to find suitable and well-motivated mappings between signal features and relevant meaning dimensions, e.g. using signal duration as an indicator of referent size.…”

Playing with language, creating complexity: Has play contributed to the evolution of complex language?

“…However, children's innovative potential is more apparent in the acquisition of instrumental skills rather than social conventions . Because language is a social convention, and children are faithful imitators of social conventions, it is doubtful that children are the primary agents of linguistic innovation and language change …”

“…97 Because language is a social convention, and children are faithful imitators of social conventions, 97 it is doubtful that children are the primary agents of linguistic innovation and language change. [98][99][100] Instead, we argue that a propensity for playful innovation that has been cemented with respect to tools and objects during childhood reaches into adolescence and adulthood, where it may provide one engine for linguistic innovation and change that has allowed language to accommodate the complex social conditions made possible by self-domestication. As argued earlier, to extend playing behavior into adulthood is one of the hallmarks of domestication.…”