{"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/"}]}