Foundations of Representation: Where Might Graphical Symbol Systems Come From?

Garrod, Simon; Fay, Nicolas; Lee, John Y.K.; Oberlander, Jon; Macleod, Tracy

doi:10.1080/03640210701703659

Cited by 240 publications

(429 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…This work bears some resemblance to a recent body of experimental work on the shared construction of communication systems (27)(28)(29)(30). Of particular relevance is a recent paper by Selten and Warglien (30) that demonstrates that pairs of participants sometimes can create structured and efficient communication systems over the course of repeated interactions.…”

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confidence: 83%

“…The major difference between the experiments described here and the work of Selten and Warglien is the role of intentional design. In Selten and Warglien's experiments, as in those of Galantucci (27) and Garrod et al (28,29), participants interact repeatedly with the explicit goal of arriving at a shared system for communication. Therefore the systems they construct are the outcome of conscious design.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language

Kirby

Cornish

Smith

2008

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

694

919

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We introduce an experimental paradigm for studying the cumulative cultural evolution of language. In doing so we provide the first experimental validation for the idea that cultural transmission can lead to the appearance of design without a designer. Our experiments involve the iterated learning of artificial languages by human participants. We show that languages transmitted culturally evolve in such a way as to maximize their own transmissibility: over time, the languages in our experiments become easier to learn and increasingly structured. Furthermore, this structure emerges purely as a consequence of the transmission of language over generations, without any intentional design on the part of individual language learners. Previous computational and mathematical models suggest that iterated learning provides an explanation for the structure of human language and link particular aspects of linguistic structure with particular constraints acting on language during its transmission. The experimental work presented here shows that the predictions of these models, and models of cultural evolution more generally, can be tested in the laboratory.cultural transmission ͉ iterated learning ͉ language evolution T he emergence of human language has been cited by Maynard Smith and Szathmary (1) as the most recent of a small number of highly significant evolutionary transitions in the history of life on earth. The reason they give for including language in this list is that language enables an entirely new system for information transmission: human culture. Language is unique in being a system that supports unlimited heredity of cultural information, allowing our species to develop a unique kind of open-ended adaptability.Although this feature of language as a carrier of cultural information obviously is important, we have argued that there is a second sense in which language is an evolutionary milestone: each utterance has a dual purpose, carrying semantic content but also conveying information about its own construction (2-5). Upon hearing a sentence, a language learner uses the structure of that sentence to make new inferences about the language that produced it. This process allows learners to reverse-engineer the language of their speech community from the utterances they hear. Language thus is both a conveyer of cultural information (in Maynard Smith and Szathmary's sense) and is itself culturally transmitted. This cultural transmission makes language an evolutionary system in its own right (2-3), suggesting another approach to the explanation of linguistic structure. Crucially, language also represents an excellent test domain for theories of cultural evolution in general, because the acquisition and processing of language are relatively well understood, and because language has an interesting, nontrivial, but well documented structure. § During the past 10 years a wide range of computational and mathematical models have looked at a particular kind of cultural evolution termed ''iterated learning'' (4-13).Iterated ...

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confidence: 83%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language

Kirby

Cornish

Smith

2008

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

694

919

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…While this simplification allows us to explore the consequences of the minimal level of interaction necessary to support cultural transmission, real language transmission features far richer forms of interaction and there is some evidence that such interaction may be necessary for certain types of communication system to emerge (see e.g. Garrod et al, 2007;2010). The effect of reciprocal interaction on the regularization of unpredictable variation is currently unknown, although one possibility is that regularization might actually occur more quickly due to alignment during interaction (Branigan, Pickering & Cleland, 2000).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, symbolic and structured communicative behaviours have been shown to arise through (communicative or learning) interactions between adults in laboratory contexts (e.g. Garrod et al, 2007;Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eliminating unpredictable variation through iterated learning

2010

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Human languages may be shaped not only by the (individual psychological) processes of language acquisition, but also by population-level processes arising from repeated language learning and use. One prevalent feature of natural languages is that they avoid unpredictable variation. The current work explores whether linguistic predictability might result from a process of iterated learning in simple diffusion chains of adults. An iterated artificial language learning methodology was used, in which participants were organized into diffusion chains: the first individual in each chain was exposed to an artificial language which exhibited unpredictability in plural marking, and subsequent learners were exposed to the language produced by the previous learner in their chain. Diffusion chains, but not isolate learners, were found to cumulatively increase predictability of plural marking by lexicalising the choice of plural marker. This suggests that such gradual, cumulative population-level processes offer a possible explanation for regularity in language.

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“…In experiments, this happens both over episodes of communication (Garrod et al, 2007) and transmission (Caldwell & Smith, 2012). The signals become simpler and less transparent, and therefore more arbitrary for new learners.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interactive Origin of Iconicity

Tamariz¹,

Roberts

Martinez³

et al. 2017

Cognitive Science

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We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of (a) participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and (b) individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection (as opposed to by guided variation).

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Foundations of Representation: Where Might Graphical Symbol Systems Come From?

Cited by 240 publications

References 23 publications

Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language

Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language

Eliminating unpredictable variation through iterated learning

The Interactive Origin of Iconicity

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