Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Experimental studies of the cultural evolution of languagehave focused on how constraints on learning andcommunication drive emergence of linguistic structure. Yetlanguage is typically transmitted by experts who adjust theinput in ways that facilitates learning by novices, e.g. throughchild-directed speech. Using iterated language learning ofbinary auditory sequences, we explored how language changeis affected by experts’ intention to teach the language tonovices. Comparison between teaching chains and simpletransmission chains revealed that teaching was associatedwith a greater rate of innovation which led to emergence ofmore expressive languages consisting of shorter signals. Thisis the first study to show that during cultural transmission,teaching can modify, and potentially optimise, functionalcharacteristics of language.