Investigating how cultural transmission leads to the appearance of design without a designer in human communication systems

2012 ◽  
pp. 113-138
Author(s):  
Hannah Cornish
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Human Communication

Investigating how cultural transmission leads to the appearance of design without a designer in human communication systems

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Cornish
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Structural Properties ◽  
Communication System ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Shared Task ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Interactive Communication ◽  
Adaptive Structure ◽  
The Way

Recent work on the emergence and evolution of human communication has focused on getting novel systems to evolve from scratch in the laboratory. Many of these studies have adopted an interactive construction approach, whereby pairs of participants repeatedly interact with one another to gradually develop their own communication system whilst engaged in some shared task. This paper describes four recent studies that take a different approach, showing how adaptive structure can emerge purely as a result of cultural transmission through single chains of learners. By removing elements of interactive communication and focusing only on the way in which language is repeatedly acquired by learners, we hope to gain a better understanding of how useful structural properties of language could have emerged without being intentionally designed or innovated.

How to create a human communication system

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casey J. Lister ◽  
Nicolas Fay
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Communication System ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Sign Systems ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Interactive Feedback ◽  
Single Modality

Following a synthesis of naturalistic and experimental studies of language creation, we propose a theoretical model that describes the process through which human communication systems might arise and evolve. Three key processes are proposed that give rise to effective, efficient and shared human communication systems: (1) motivated signs that directly resemble their meaning facilitate cognitive alignment, improving communication success; (2) behavioral alignment onto an inventory of shared sign-to-meaning mappings bolsters cognitive alignment between interacting partners; (3) sign refinement, through interactive feedback, enhances the efficiency of the evolving communication system. By integrating the findings across a range of diverse studies, we propose a theoretical model of the process through which the earliest human communication systems might have arisen and evolved. Importantly, because our model is not bound to a single modality it can describe the creation of shared sign systems across a range of contexts, informing theories of language creation and evolution.

Unbounded Dependency Constructions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui P. Chaves ◽  
Michael T. Putnam
Keyword(s):  
Communication Systems ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Psycholinguistic Research ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Unbounded Dependencies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Grammatical Structures ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

This book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the fact that words which go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other. The kind of long-distance dependency that this volume is concerned with has been the subject of intense linguistic and psycholinguistic research for the last half century, and offers a unique insight into the nature of grammatical structures and their interaction with cognition. The constructions in which these unbounded dependencies arise are difficult to model and come with a rather puzzling array of constraints which have defied characterization and a proper explanation. For example, there are filler-gap dependencies in which the filler phrase is a plural phrase formed from the combination of each of the extracted phrases, and there are filler-gap constructions in which the filler phrase itself contains a gap that is linked to another filler phrase. What is more, different types of filler-gap dependency can compound, in the same sentence. Conversely, not all kinds of filler-gap dependencies are equally licit; some are robustly ruled out by the grammar whereas others have a less clear status because they have graded acceptability and can be made to improve in ideal contexts and conditions. This work provides a detailed survey of these linguistic phenomena and extant accounts, while also incorporating new experimental evidence to shed light on why the phenomena are the way they are and what important research on this topic lies ahead.

The Interactive Evolution of Human Communication Systems

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Fay ◽  
Simon Garrod ◽  
Leo Roberts ◽  
Nik Swoboda
Keyword(s):  
Communication Systems ◽  
Human Communication

scholarly journals Nonhuman and Nonhuman-Human Communication: Some Issues and Questions

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene M. Pepperberg
Keyword(s):  
Communication Systems ◽  
Vocal Communication ◽  
Vocal Learning ◽  
Simple Object ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Psittacus Erithacus ◽  
Simple Matter ◽  
Number Of Species

Deciphering nonhuman communication – particularly nonhuman vocal communication – has been a longstanding human quest. We are, for example, fascinated by the songs of birds and whales, the grunts of apes, the barks of dogs, and the croaks of frogs; we wonder about their potential meaning and their relationship to human language. Do these utterances express little more than emotional states, or do they convey actual bits and bytes of concrete information? Humans’ numerous attempts to decipher nonhuman systems have, however, progressed slowly. We still wonder why only a small number of species are capable of vocal learning, a trait that, because it allows for innovation and adaptation, would seem to be a prerequisite for most language-like abilities. Humans have also attempted to teach nonhumans elements of our system, using both vocal and nonvocal systems. The rationale for such training is that the extent of success in instilling symbolic reference provides some evidence for, at the very least, the cognitive underpinnings of parallels between human and nonhuman communication systems. However, separating acquisition of reference from simple object-label association is not a simple matter, as reference begins with such associations, and the point at which true reference emerges is not always obvious. I begin by discussing these points and questions, predominantly from the viewpoint of someone studying avian abilities. I end by examining the question posed by Premack: do nonhumans that have achieved some level of symbolic reference then process information differently from those that have not? I suggest the answer is likely “yes,” giving examples from my research on Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus).

scholarly journals Comparative perspectives on communication in human and nonhuman primates: Grounding meaning in broadly conserved processes of voice production, perception, affect and cognition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Nielsen ◽  
Drew Rendall
Keyword(s):  
Structure Function ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Nonhuman Primates ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Voice Production ◽  
General Constraints ◽  
Affect And Cognition ◽  
Synthetic Approaches

Comparative perspectives on primate and human communication have been marked by two equally untenable extremes: either language is special, without significant evolutionary precedent, or it is not: it is continuous in most aspects with animal communication systems. In this article we outline fertile common ground and point towards synthetic approaches that can unify the study of human and animal communication. First, we suggest that humans have a large suite of perceptual biases that introduce a pressure for languages to be 'functionally deployable'. We suggest that human languages are shaped by this pressure, along with previously established pressures to be both learnable and compressible, and domain-general constraints like memory. Collectively, we suggest that non-arbitrary structure-function relationships are crucial for the deployment of language and communication systems more generally.

scholarly journals Animal cognition and the evolution of human language: why we cannot focus solely on communication

2019 ◽  
Vol 375 (1789) ◽  
pp. 20190046 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Tecumseh Fitch
Keyword(s):  
Communication Systems ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Animal Cognition ◽  
Small Subset ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Royal Road ◽  
Communicative Signals

Studies of animal communication are often assumed to provide the ‘royal road’ to understanding the evolution of human language. After all, language is the pre-eminent system of human communication: doesn't it make sense to search for its precursors in animal communication systems? From this viewpoint, if some characteristic feature of human language is lacking in systems of animal communication, it represents a crucial gap in evolution, and evidence for an evolutionary discontinuity. Here I argue that we should reverse this logic: because a defining feature of human language is its ability to flexibly represent and recombine concepts, precursors for many important components of language should be sought in animal cognition rather than animal communication. Animal communication systems typically only permit expression of a small subset of the concepts that can be represented and manipulated by that species. Thus, if a particular concept is not expressed in a species' communication system this is not evidence that it lacks that concept. I conclude that if we focus exclusively on communicative signals, we sell the comparative analysis of language evolution short. Therefore, animal cognition provides a crucial (and often neglected) source of evidence regarding the biology and evolution of human language. This article is part of the theme issue ‘What can animal communication teach us about human language?’

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