title: Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure.
abstract: Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over the last 20 years that emphasises the contributions of individual learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution to explaining the structural design features of language. These 3 complex adaptive systems exist in a network of interactions: individual learning biases shape the dynamics of cultural evolution; universal features of linguistic structure arise from this cultural process and form the ultimate linguistic phenotype; the nature of this phenotype affects the fitness landscape for the biological evolution of the language faculty; and in turn this determines individuals' learning bias. Using a combination of computational simulation, laboratory experiments, and comparison with real-world cases of language emergence, I show that linguistic structure emerges as a natural outcome of cultural evolution once certain minimal biological requirements are in place.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. simon@ling.ed.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kirby
mesh_terms: D015982:Bias; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003142:Communication; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003468:Cultural Evolution; D003469:Culture; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning; D008037:Linguistics
keywords: Computational modeling; Cultural evolution; Iterated learning; Language evolution