Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Kenny Smith (CLE, University of Edinburgh)

Title: Spoken iterated learning

Abstract: We often run iterated learning experiments using written language, largely as a methodological convenience - participants are trained on text labels for objects or events, then they produce new text labels which we use as training data for the next participant in a chain of transmission. We have run similar experiments using gesture, but seldom using speech. Since written text might engage different learning and/or processing strategies than spoken language (and sign might be different again) there’s a potential concern that some of what we regard as core results might be dependent on our use of written text; we might also be missing out on studying interesting design features of natural language that represent adaptations to the communication of propositional structures over a rapid-fading serial channel like speech. I’ll present some preliminary results from two studies. In the first study we are checking that one of our core results, that structure emerges as a trade-off between learning and communication, still comes out in a conceptual replication in the spoken modality. In the second study we manipulate properties of the channel that participants communicate through (we filter out low and high frequencies) to see if this affects the contrasts employed in the languages that develop, specifically whether they adapt to avoid hard-to-hear cues and capitalise instead on the intact frequency regions.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Andres Karjus

Centre for Language Evolution