Smith, k.
University of Edinburgh
Language is a product of statistical learning in individuals, and universal structural features of language presumably reflect properties of the way in which we learn. But language is not necessarily a direct reflection of properties of individual learners: languages are culturally-transmitted systems, which persist in populations via a repeated cycle of learning and use, where learners learn from linguistic data which represents the communicative behaviour of other individuals who learnt their language in the same way. Languages evolve as a result of their cultural transmission, and the language is therefore the product of a potentially complex interplay between the biases of human language learners, the communicative functions which language serves, and the ways in which languages are transmitted in populations. In this talk I will present a series of experimental studies with human participants, based around statistical learning, dyadic interaction and iterated learning paradigms, which allow us to explore the relationship between learning and culture in shaping linguistic structure; I will then finish with a recent experimental study looking at cultural evolution in non-human primates, which suggests that systematic structure may be an inevitable outcome of cultural transmission, rather than a reflection of uniquely human biases in statistical learning.