Here We Don't Speak, Here We Whistle. Mobilizing A Cultural Reading of Cognition, Sound and Ecology in the Design of a Language Support System for the Silbo Gomero.

This thesis presents the study of a whistled form of language known as the Silbo Gomero (Island of La Gomera, Canarian Archipelago). After fifty years of almost total extinction this form of communication has been revived, shifting from the fields where it was once used by peasant islanders and into the space of the classroom. Here, it is integrated into the curriculum of the island’s schools while providing children with a rich cultural platform that instigates linguistic and auditory experimentation. As a response to this transformation, the need to develop didactic materials is presented as one of the main challenges encountered by the community. Taking this condition as the driver of its research, this body of work draws on phonological, bioacoustic and cognitive theories to develop a formal understanding of the Silbo Gomero in a way which aims to complement the whistler’s own experience and mastery of the language by also developing an ethnographic reading of this indigenous body of knowledge and its characteristic auditory perceptual ecology. The investigation has culminated in the design of a digital application, El Laberinto del Sonido, and its active use within the educational community of the island. Finally, emphasising the practice-based nature of the research, this thesis attempts to relocate the question of intangible heritage from a focus on cultural safeguarding and transmission to one of experimentation, where an indigenous body of knowledge not only provides new exploratory paradigms in the design of didactic materials, but also contributes towards the sustainability of culturally situated forms of apprenticeship within contemporary educational contexts

Adults are more efficient in creating and transmitting novel signalling systems than children

Iterated language learning experiments have shown that meaningful and structured signalling systems emerge when there is pressure for signals to be both learnable and expressive. Yet such experiments have mainly been conducted with adults using language-like signals. Here we explore whether structured signalling systems can also emerge when signalling domains are unfamiliar and when the learners are children with their well-attested cognitive and pragmatic limitations. In Experiment 1, we compared iterated learning of binary auditory sequences denoting small sets of meanings in chains of adults and 5-7-year old children. Signalling systems became more learnable even though iconicity and structure did not emerge despite applying a homonymy filter designed to keep the systems expressive. When the same types of signals were used in referential communication by adult and child dyads in Experiment 2, only the adults, but not the children, were able to negotiate shared iconic and structured signals. Referential communication using their native language by 4-5-year old children in Experiment 3 showed that only interaction with adults, but not with peers resulted in informative expressions. These findings suggest that emergence and transmission of communication systems is unlikely to be driven by children, and point to the importance of cognitive maturity and pragmatic expertise of learners as well as feedback-based scaffolding of communicative effectiveness by experts during language evolution

Melodic universals emerge or are sustained through cultural evolution

To understand why music is structured the way it is, we need an explanation that accounts for both the universality and variability found in musical traditions. Here we test whether statistical universals that have been identified for melodic structures in music can emerge as a result of cultural adaptation to human biases through iterated learning. We use data from an experiment in which artificial whistled systems, where sounds produced with a slide whistle were learned by human participants and transmitted multiple times from person to person. These sets of whistled signals needed to be memorised and recalled and the reproductions of one participant were used as the input set for the next. We tested for the emergence of seven different melodic features, such as discrete pitches, motivic patterns, or phrase repetition, and found some evidence for the presence of most of these statistical universals. We interpret this as promising evidence that, similarly to rhythmic universals, iterated learning experiments can also unearth melodic statistical universals. More, ideally cross-cultural, experiments are nonetheless needed. Simulating the cultural transmission of artificial proto-musical systems can help unravel the origins of universal tendencies in musical structures.Computer Systems, Imagery and Medi

Iterated teaching can optimise language functionality

Experimental studies of the cultural evolution of language have focused on how constraints on learning and communication drive emergence of linguistic structure. Yet language is typically transmitted by experts who adjust the input in ways that facilitates learning by novices, e.g. through child-directed speech. Using iterated language learning of binary auditory sequences, we explored how language change is affected by experts’ intention to teach the language to novices. Comparison between teaching chains and simple transmission chains revealed that teaching was associated with a greater rate of innovation which led to emergence of more expressive languages consisting of shorter signals. This is the first study to show that during cultural transmission, teaching can modify, and potentially optimise, functional characteristics of language

Here we don't speak, here we whistle : mobilizing a cultural reading of cognition, sound and ecology in the design of a language support system for the Silbo Gomero

This thesis presents the study of a whistled form of language known as the Silbo Gomero (Island of La Gomera, Canarian Archipelago). After fifty years of almost total extinction this form of communication has been revived, shifting from the fields where it was once used by peasant islanders and into the space of the classroom. Here, it is integrated into the curriculum of the island’s schools while providing children with a rich cultural platform that instigates linguistic and auditory experimentation. As a response to this transformation, the need to develop didactic materials is presented as one of the main challenges encountered by the community. Taking this condition as the driver of its research, this body of work draws on phonological, bioacoustic and cognitive theories to develop a formal understanding of the Silbo Gomero in a way which aims to complement the whistler’s own experience and mastery of the language by also developing an ethnographic reading of this indigenous body of knowledge and its characteristic auditory perceptual ecology. The investigation has culminated in the design of a digital application, El Laberinto del Sonido, and its active use within the educational community of the island. Finally, emphasising the practice-based nature of the research, this thesis attempts to relocate the question of intangible heritage from a focus on cultural safeguarding and transmission to one of experimentation, where an indigenous body of knowledge not only provides new exploratory paradigms in the design of didactic materials, but also contributes towards the sustainability of culturally situated forms of apprenticeship within contemporary educational contexts.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Music adapting to the brain: From diffusion chains to neurophysiology

During the last decade, the use of experimental approaches on cultural evolution research has provided novel insights, and supported theoretical predictions, on the principles driving the evolution of human cultural systems. Laboratory simulations of language evolution showed how general-domain constraints on learning, in addition to pressures for language to be expressive, may be responsible for the emergence of linguistic structure. Languages change when culturally transmitted, adapting to fit, among all, the cognitive abilities of their users. As a result, they become regular and compressed, easier to acquire and reproduce. Although a similar theory has been recently extended to the musical domain, the empirical investigation in this field is still scarce. In addition, no study to our knowledge directly addressed the role of cognitive constraints in cultural transmission with neurophysiological investigation. In my thesis I addressed both these issues with a combination of behavioral and neurophysiological methods, in three experimental studies. In study 1 (Chapter 2), I examined the evolution of structural regularities in artificial melodic systems while they were being transmitted across individuals via coordination and alignment. To this purpose I used a new laboratory model of music transmission: the multi-generational signaling games (MGSGs), a variant of the signaling games. This model combines classical aspects of lab-based semiotic models of communication, coordination and interaction (horizontal transmission), with the vertical transmission across generations of the iterated learning model (vertical transmission). Here, two-person signaling games are organized in diffusion chains of several individuals (generations). In each game, the two players (a sender and a receiver) must agree on a common code - here a miniature system where melodic riffs refer to emotions. The receiver in one game becomes the sender in the next game, possibly retransmitting the code previously learned to another generation of participants, and so on to complete the diffusion chain. I observed the gradual evolution of several structures features of musical phrases over generations: proximity, continuity, symmetry, and melodic compression. Crucially, these features are found in most of musical cultures of the world. I argue that we tapped into universal processing mechanisms of structured sequence processing, possibly at work in the evolution of real music. In study 2 (Chapter 3), I explored the link between cultural adaptation and neural information processing. To this purpose, I combined behavioral and EEG study on 2 successive days. I show that the latency of the mismatch negativity (MMN) recorded in a pre-attentive auditory sequence processing task on day 1, predicts how well participants learn and transmit an artificial tone system with affective semantics in two signaling games on day 2. Notably, MMN latencies also predict which structural changes are introduced by participants into the artificial tone system. In study 3 (Chapter 4), I replicated and extended behavioral and neurophysiological findings on the temporal domain of music, with two independent experiments. In the first experiment, I used MGSGs as a laboratory model of cultural evolution of rhythmic equitone patterns referring to distinct emotions. As a result of transmission, rhythms developed a universal property of music structure, namely temporal regularity (or isochronicity). In the second experiment, I anchored this result with neural predictors. I showed that neural information processing capabilities of individuals, as measured with the MMN on day 1, can predict learning, transmission, and regularization of rhythmic patterns in signaling games on day 2. In agreement with study 2, I observe that MMN brain timing may reflect the efficiency of sensory systems to process auditory patterns. Functional differences in those systems, across individuals, may produce a different sensitivity to pressures for regularities in the cultural system. Finally, I argue that neural variability can be an important source of variability of cultural traits in a population. My work is the first to systematically describe the emergence of structural properties of melodic and rhythmic systems in the laboratory, using an explicit game-theoretic model of cultural transmission in which agents freely interact and exchange information. Critically, it provides the first demonstration that social learning, transmission, and cultural adaptation are constrained and driven by individual differences in the functional organization of sensory systems

Empirical approaches for investigating the origins of structure in speech

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. In language evolution research, the use of computational and experimental methods to investigate the emergence of structure in language is exploding. In this review, we look exclusively at work exploring the emergence of structure in speech, on both a categorical level (what drives the emergence of an inventory of individual speech sounds), and a combinatorial level (how these individual speech sounds emerge and are reused as part of larger structures). We show that computational and experimental methods for investigating population-level processes can be effectively used to explore and measure the effects of learning, communication and transmission on the emergence of structure in speech. We also look at work on child language acquisition as a tool for generating and validating hypotheses for the emergence of speech categories. Further, we review the effects of noise, iconicity and production effects