The emergence of verse templates through iterated learning

deCastro-Arrazola, Varun; Kirby, Simon

doi:10.1093/jole/lzy013

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…One possible method to study the biology−culture interplay in the laboratory is the iterated learning paradigm, where each participant learns a behavior which was produced (and modified) by a previous participant who learnt it the same way. Iterated learning experiments have been done to better understand linguistic morphology, poetry, and musical rhythm . − Iterated learning experiments where participants imitate and transmit nonsense syllable sequences could be used to show whether, and if so how, cultural transmission amplifies domain‐general biases resulting in rhythmic patterns of speech.…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Ravignani

Bella

Falk

et al. 2019

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Why does human speech have rhythm? As we cannot travel back in time to witness how speech developed its rhythmic properties and why humans have the cognitive skills to process them, we rely on alternative methods to find out. One powerful tool is the comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species to determine which traits are shared between species and which are recent human inventions. Vocalizations of many species exhibit temporal structure, but little is known about how these rhythmic structures evolved, are perceived and produced, their biological and developmental bases, and communicative functions. We review the literature on rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations as a first step toward understanding similarities and differences across species. We extend this review to quantitative techniques that are useful for computing rhythmic structure in acoustic sequences and hence facilitate cross‐species research. We report links between vocal perception and motor coordination and the differentiation of rhythm based on hierarchical temporal structure. While still far from a complete cross‐species perspective of speech rhythm, our review puts some pieces of the puzzle together.

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Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Ravignani

Bella

Falk

et al. 2019

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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“…Third, most importantly, non-obvious design-like features of human cultural systems emerge in these experiments, quite quickly and without apparently being strongly seeded by the experimenters. Examples include aspects of language structure such as compositionality, grammatical regularity and animacy distinctions [35][36][37]; conceptual categorization imposed on underlying continua [38]; the rhythmic universals observed in music [25], verse-metre conventions [39] and simplifications of cause-effect relations [34].…”

Section: Conceptual Issues In Cultural Evolution Frommentioning

confidence: 99%

Selection, adaptation, inheritance and design in human culture: the view from the Price equation

Nettle

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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For decades, parts of the literature on human culture have been gripped by an analogy: culture changes in a way that is substantially isomorphic to genetic evolution. This leads to a number of sub-claims: that design-like properties in cultural traditions should be explained in a parallel way to the design-like features of organisms, namely with reference to selection; that culture is a system of inheritance; and that cultural evolutionary processes can produce adaptation in the genetic sense. The Price equation provides a minimal description of any evolutionary system, and a method for identifying the action of selection. As such, it helps clarify some of these claims about culture conceptually. Looking closely through the lens of the Price equation, the differences between genes and culture come into sharp relief. Culture is only a system of inheritance metaphorically, or as an idealization, and the idealization may lead us to overlook causally important features of how cultural influence works. Design-like properties in cultural systems may owe more to transmission biases than to cultural selection. Where culture enhances genetic fitness, it is ambiguous whether what is doing the work is cultural transmission, or just the genetically evolved properties of the mind. I conclude that there are costs to trying to press culture into a template based on Darwinian evolution, even if one broadens the definition of ‘Darwinian’. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Fifty years of the Price equation’.

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“…Studying the biology-culture interface can be used to reconcile old, unproductive nature-nurture debates by potentially showing how cognitive biases and cultural transmission interact to deliver the rhythmic structure of speech. Work along these lines has been done for linguistic morphology 165 , poetry 166 , and musical rhythm 90,[167][168][169] . An experimental design similar to these studies could be used to show how domain-general biases are amplified by cultural transmission resulting in rhythmic patterns of speech.…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of speech rhythm: a cross-species perspective

Ravignani

Bella

Falk

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Cognition and communication, at the core of human speech rhythm, do not leave a fossil record. However, if the purpose is to understand the origin and evolution of speech rhythm, alternative methods are available. A powerful tool is comparative approach: studying the presence or absence of cognitive/behavioral traits in other species, drawing conclusions on which traits are shared between species, and which are recent human inventions. Here we apply this approach to traits related to human speech rhythm. Many species exhibit temporal structure in their vocalizations but little is known about the range of rhythmic structures perceived and produced, their biological and developmental bases, and communicative functions. We review the literatures on human and non-human studies of rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations to survey similarities and differences. We report important links between vocal perception and motor coordination, and the differentiation of rhythm based on hierarchical temporal structure. We extend this review to quantitative techniques useful for computing rhythmic structure in acoustic sequences and hence facilitating cross-species research. While still far from a full comparative cross-species perspective of speech rhythm, we are closer to fitting missing pieces of the puzzle.

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The emergence of verse templates through iterated learning

Abstract: This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Language Evolution following peer review. The version of record Varu deCastro-Arrazola, Simon Kirby, The emergence of verse templates through iterated learning,

Cited by 12 publications

References 35 publications

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

Selection, adaptation, inheritance and design in human culture: the view from the Price equation

Evolution of speech rhythm: a cross-species perspective

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