{"pk":29480,"title":"Simple kinship systems are more learnable","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Natural languages partition meanings into labelled categoriesin different ways, but this variation is constrained: languagesappear to achieve a near-optimal trade-off between simplicityand informativeness. Across 3 artificial language learning ex-periments, we verify that objectively simpler kinship systemsare easier for human participants to learn, and also show thatthe errors which occur during learning tend to increase sim-plicity while reducing informativeness. This latter result sug-gests that pressures for simplicity and informativeness operatethrough different mechanisms: learning favours simplicity, butthe pressure for informativeness must be enforced elsewhere,e.g. during language use in communicative interaction.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"language; kinship; complexity"}],"section":"Concepts and Systems","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9qr072z1","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Kenny","middle_name":"","last_name":"Smith","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Stella","middle_name":"","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Sara","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rolando","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Simon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kirby","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Jia","middle_name":"E.","last_name":"Loy","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29480/galley/19340/download/"}]}