EXPERIMENTALLY INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN THE STRUCTURING OF THE LINGUISTIC SYSTEM OVER CULTURAL EVOLUTION

摘要

How we come to encode certain features at the expense of others in the linguistic system is an important topic in the concepts and categories literature (cf. Ramscar, Yarlett, Dye, Denny & Thorpe, 2010). Whilst it is almost certainly true that historical contingency plays a prominent role, there is also evidence to suggest that pressures from learnability and expressivity act as competing constraints in shaping the system (Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008; Smith, Tamariz & Kirby, 2013). The goal of the current work is to experimentally investigate the extent to which context can govern these two pressures.