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{
    "pk": 25433,
    "title": "Language evolution in the lab tends toward informative communication",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Why do languages parcel human experience into categories in\nthe ways they do? Languages vary widely in their category\nsystems but not arbitrarily, and one possibility is that this\nconstrained variation reflects universal communicative needs.\nConsistent with this idea, it has been shown that attested\ncategory systems tend to support highly informative\ncommunication. However it is not yet known what process\nproduces these informative systems. Here we show that\nhuman simulation of cultural transmission in the lab produces\nsystems of semantic categories that converge toward greater\ninformativeness, in the domains of color and spatial relations.\nThese findings suggest that larger-scale cultural transmission\nover historical time could have produced the diverse yet\ninformative category systems found in the world’s languages.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Informative communication"
        },
        {
            "word": "language evolution"
        },
        {
            "word": "iterated learning"
        },
        {
            "word": "cultural transmission"
        },
        {
            "word": "Spatial Cognition"
        },
        {
            "word": "color naming"
        },
        {
            "word": "semantic universals"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9rf1f631",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Alexandra",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Carstensen",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Psychology University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Jing",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Xu",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Cameron",
            "middle_name": "T",
            "last_name": "Smith",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Linguistics University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Terry",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Regier",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science Program University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2015-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25433/galley/15057/download/"
        }
    ]
}