A SIMPLE INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR INVESTIGATING GENETIC AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

摘要

Two areas concerning language evolution have received increasing interest in recent years: the genetic evolution of the language faculty and the cultural evolution of language. However, these study areas are somewhat separate, and there is a need to integrate these efforts and explore the relevant gene-culture coevolutionary interactions (Mesoudi et al., 2011). The relationship between genes and language is extremely complex; therefore, there is much controversial discussion on various aspects, including the role of learning (Suzuki & Arita, 2008). Fundamentally, several researchers argue that cultural evolution has little influence on the genetic evolution of language although, various results have shown that genetic biases are essential for a proper understanding of language evolution (Fitch, 2011). For example, Chater et al. (2009) have shown, by using a computational model, that there are strong restrictions on the conditions under which the Baldwin effect can embed arbitrary linguistic constraints and the effect only emerges when language provides a stable target for natural selection.