The Effects of Modified Variables on an Iterated Learning Model of Linguistic Evolution by Cultural Transmission

It has been suggested that human language emerged as a function of three adaptive processes: evolution by natural selection, individual learning, and cultural evolution (Kirby & Hurford, 2002). In this paradigm, biological evolution is intrinsically difficult to explore due to the ephemeral nature of language; however, the interface between learning and cultural evolution has been tested in a variety of mathematical, computational, and experimental models. These models demonstrate that systematic linguistic structure can arise from the transmission of language across multiple language users. Kirby, Cornish, and Smith (2008) introduced an experimental method for studying the cumulative effect that cultural transmission has on language, and their iterated learning model represented the first experiment on human participants to suggest that the cultural transmission of language leads cumulatively to the appearance of linguistic design without any explicit designer. A new version of this experiment was conducted with a number of modified variables allowing us to test the resilience of the experimental paradigm. The modifications introduced to this version of the experiment were: