Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two factors seem to play a major role in the cultural evolutionof language. On the one hand, there is functional pressure to-wards efficient transfer of information. On the other hand, lan-guages have to be learned repeatedly and will therefore showtraces of systematic stochastic disturbances of the transmissionof linguistic knowledge. While a lot of attention has been paidto the effects of cognitive learning biases on the transmissionof language, there is reason to expect that the class of possiblyrelevant transmission perturbations is much larger. This papertherefore explores some potential effects of transmission noisedue to errors in the observation of states of the world. We lookat three case studies on (i) vagueness, (ii) meaning deflation,and (iii) underspecified lexical meaning. These case studiessuggest that transmission perturbations other than learning bi-ases might help explain attested patterns in the cultural evolu-tion of language and that perturbations due to perceptual noisemay even produce effects very similar to learning biases.