{"pk":24667,"title":"Systemic structure of kinship is shaped by evolutionary processes","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Kinship terminology varies cross-linguistically, but there are constraints on which kin may be categorised together. One proposed constraint on kinship diversity is internal co-selection: an evolutionary process where terminological changes in one generation of the kinship paradigm co-occur with parallel changes in other generations, increasing system-wide predictive structure. We compared kinship systems from 544 natural languages to simulated baselines and found higher-than-chance mutual information (MI) between generations of kin, suggesting a selective pressure for internal co-selection. We then tested experimentally whether this systematicity increases learnability. Participants were taught artificial kinship systems with either maximum or minimum MI between generations. We predicted the high-MI system would be easier to learn, but participants showed little evidence of learning in either condition. A follow-up experiment tested whether predictive structure facilitates generalisation rather than learning. Although other strategies are common, we found that participants often maximise predictive structure when generalising terms to new kin.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Evolution; Language learning; Computer-based experiment; Cross-linguistic analysis"}],"section":"Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3v73k7wt","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Maisy","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hallam","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Fiona","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jordan","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Bristol","department":""},{"first_name":"Simon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kirby","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Kenny","middle_name":"","last_name":"Smith","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24667/galley/21583/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24667/galley/14265/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24667/galley/18070/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24667/galley/21583/download/"}]}