Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One of the central goals of language evolution research is toexplain how systematic structure emerges. A culturalevolutionary approach proposes that the systematic structure oflanguage arises from the use and transmission of language.Motamedi and colleagues (2016) investigated the influences ofthese forces on the evolution of language by generating anartificial sign language in the lab. Over several generations ofnew learners and their interactions, an initially unsystematic setof silent gestures developed markers for functional categoriesof person, location, object, and action. Here we describe resultsof two studies that compared the learnability of solo-producedpantomimes versus signals that had been transmitted and usedby interlocutors. In these studies, participants saw an artificialsign and judged whether an English translation matched ormismatched the meaning of the sign. In an event-relatedpotential (ERP) study, we found that mismatches elicited largernegativities in the ERP than matches. However, those effectswere most reminiscent of the classic N400 response in theevolved signs. This study provides a clearer view on how themechanisms that drive language evolution change language toadapt to a learner’s brain.