12 research outputs found
Atypical birdsong and artificial languages provide insights into how communication systems are shaped by learning, use and transmission
In this article, I argue that a comparative approach focusing on the cognitive capacities and behavioral mechanisms that underlie vocal learning in songbirds and humans can provide valuable insights into the evolutionary origins of language. The experimental approaches I discuss use abnormal song and atypical linguistic input to study the processes of individual learning, social interaction, and cultural transmission. Atypical input places increased learning and communicative pressure on learners, so exploring how they respond to this type of input provides a particularly clear picture of the biases and constraints at work during learning and use. Furthermore, simulating the cultural transmission of these unnatural communication systems in the laboratory informs us about how learning and social biases influence the structure of communication systems in the long run. Findings based on these methods suggest fundamental similarities in the basic socialâcognitive mechanisms underlying vocal learning in birds and humans, and continuing research promises insights into the uniquely human mechanisms and into how human cognition and social behavior interact, and ultimately impact on the evolution of language
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Learners' bias to balance production effort against message uncertainty is independent of their native language
Miniature language learning is gaining increasing popularity to study biases underlying language universals. However, it is unclear whether learning preferences in these studies are influenced by learners' native language. We ask whether a previously identified bias to balance production effort against message uncertainty holds across speakers of structurally different languages. We expose English (fixed order language without case) and German (flexible order language with case) speakers to miniature languages with optional case and either fixed or flexible constituent order and study their deviations from the input. We find that English and German speakers restructure the input in the same way: They match the input constituent order proportions and use more case in the flexible order language than in the fixed order language, thus following the bias to balance production effort against message uncertainty. Our findings suggest that this bias and its specific realization are independent of learners' native language. © 2020 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)Open access articleThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]
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Learners sacrifice robust communication as a result of a social bias
Languages are subject to many competing pressures, which originate in individual-level learning and communication biases and in social biases reflecting community-level dynamics. Recent work suggests that certain aspects of language structure, such as the cross-linguistic trade-off between case and constituent-order flexibility, originate in learners' biases for efficient communication: Learners drop redundant case but retain informative case in production. Social biases can lead to retention of redundant case, resulting in systems that require more effort to produce. It is not clear, however, whether social biases can influence the use of informative cues. We tested this by exposing participants to a language with uninformative constituent order and two dialects, only one of which employed case. We manipulated the presence of social biases for and against the case dialect. Learners biased towards the no-case dialect dropped informative case without compensating for the resulting message uncertainty. Case was retained in all other conditions. © 2020 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)Open access articleThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]