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{
    "pk": 28500,
    "title": "Iconicity and Structure in the Emergence of Combinatoriality",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "One design feature of human language is its combinatorialphonology, allowing it to form an unbounded set of mean-ingful utterances from a finite set of building blocks. Re-cent experiments suggest how this feature can evolve culturallywhen continuous signals are repeatedly transmitted betweengenerations. Because the building blocks of a combinatorialsystem lack independent meaning, combinatorial structure ap-pears to be in conflict with iconicity, another property salientin language evolution. To investigate the developmental tra-jectory of iconicity during the evolution of combinatoriality,we conducted an iterated learning experiment where partici-pants learned auditory signals produced using a virtual slidewhistle. We find that iconicity emerges rapidly but is gradu-ally lost over generations as combinatorial structure continuesto increase. This suggests that iconicity biases, whose pres-ence was revealed in a signal guessing experiment, manifest innuanced ways. We discuss implications of these findings fordifferent ideas about how biases for iconicity and combinato-riality interact in language evolution.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "phonology; language evolution; combinatorialstructure; iterated learning; iconicity"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Oral Presentations",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6wm332w1",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Matthias",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Hofer",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Roger",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Levy",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2019-01-01T13:00:00-05:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28500/galley/18371/download/"
        }
    ]
}