Simon Kirby
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3592391 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Simon Kirby |
| NOMBRES | Simon |
| APELLIDO | Kirby |
| FIRMA | KIRBY S |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6496-1340 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 40 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Children's narrow learning bottleneck accelerates the emergence of statistical properties of language
Learners are limited in how much they can learn when a language is passed from one generation to the next. This transmission bottleneck is thought to play a crucial role in shaping language by promoting the emergence of systematic structure that enhances learnability. Prior work has investigated the impact of transmission bottlenecks by experimentally manipulating how much input learners receive. However, in natural language learning, bottlenecks…
The lexicon adapts to competing communicative pressures
Cross-linguistically, lexicons tend to be more phonetically clustered than required by the phonotactics of the language; that is, words within a language are more similar to each other than they need to be. In this study, we investigate how this property evolves under the influence of competing communicative pressures: a production-side pressure to re-use more easily articulated sounds, and a comprehension-side pressure for distinctiveness of wor…
Predictive Structure Emerges During the Generalisation of Kin Terms to New Referents
Despite cross-linguistic diversity in how kin relations map to terminology, there are constraints on which kin may be categorised together. But what are the constraints on kin term variation, and where do they come from? One proposed constraint is internal co-selection—an evolutionary process where terminological changes in one generation of kin co-occur with parallel changes in other generations. This results in kin categories which are predicta…
Linguistic Rule Generalisation Creates the Same Distributional Structure That Feeds It
Part of language’s great expressivity comes from its users creating new forms by applying familiar rules to novel items. But linguistic rules aren’t all created equal—some are more readily generalisable than others. In this paper, we focus on how rule generalisation is affected by certain properties of frequency distributions. In an artificial language learning experiment that asks adult learners to generalise using one of two suffixes, we find t…
Evidence for word order harmony between abstract categories in silent gesture
Cross-category harmony is the tendency for languages to use consistent orders of heads and dependents across different types of phrases. For example, languages tend to either place both verbs and adpositions before their dependents (e.g., 'seethe girl', 'tothe store' as in English) or after (e.g., 'the girlsee', 'the storeto' as in Turkish). Harmony has been argued to reflect a cognitive bias for simpler rules: a single high level abstract rule i…
The learning bias for cross-category harmony is sensitive to semantic similarity
Grammatical unidirectionality is not reflected in individual preferences when performing artificial semantic extension
Grammaticalization is the process whereby lexical items change into grammatical items. This phenomenon is widely attested, while the change from grammatical to lexical is far less common. We ran two experiments to test whether this unidirectional tendency originates with a preference for extending lexical meanings to grammatical ones rather than vice versa. We focus on body parts and spatial relations. In Experiment 1, participants were told the …
Cultural Transmission Promotes the Emergence of Statistical Properties That Support Language Learning
Language is passed across generations through cultural transmission. Prior experimental work, where participants reproduced sets of non‐linguistic sequences in transmission chains, shows that this process gives rise to two characteristic statistical properties of language that enhance its learnability: the statistical coherence of words and the Zipfian distribution of word frequencies. In this study, we extend this work in three ways. First, we r…
With or Without a System
Certain recurrent features of language characterize the way a whole language system is structured. By contrast, others target specific categories of items within those wider systems. For example, languages tend to exhibit consistent order of heads and dependents across different phrases—a system‐wide regularity known as harmony. While this tendency is generally robust, some specific syntactic categories appear to deviate from the trend. We examin…
The learning bias for cross-category harmony is sensitive to semantic similarity
Cross-category harmony is one of the most well-known typological universals. It describes a trend of consistent alignment of different syntactic categories across phrases within a language. Explanations for this universal vary as to whether cognitive factors play a role or the tendency is instead due to mechanisms of language change alone. In this article we report a series of artificial language learning experiments that aim to test a hypothesiz…
Language emergence can take multiple paths
Research on emerging sign languages suggests that younger sign languages may make greater use of the z-axis, moving outwards from the body, than more established sign languages when describing the relationships between participants and events (Padden et al. 2010). This has been suggested to reflect a transition from iconicity rooted in the body (Meir et al. 2007) towards a more abstract schematic iconicity. We present the results of an experiment…
Adjective position and referential efficiency in American Sign Language
Previous research has pointed at communicative efficiency as a possible constraint on language structure. Here we investigated adjective position in American Sign Language (ASL), a language with relatively flexible word order, to test the incremental efficiency hypothesis, according to which both speakers and signers try to produce efficient referential expressions that are sensitive to the word order of their languages. The results of three expe…
From improvisation to learning
Silent gesture studies, in which hearing participants from different linguistic backgrounds produce gestures to communicate events, have been used to test hypotheses about the cognitive biases that govern cross-linguistic word order preferences. In particular, the differential use of SOV and SVO order to communicate, respectively, extensional events (where the direct object exists independently of the event; e.g., girl throws ball) and intensiona…
The Seeds of the Noun-Verb Distinction in the Manual Modality
The noun-verb distinction has long been considered a fundamental property of human language, and has been found in some form even in the earliest stages of language emergence, including homesign and the early generations of emerging sign languages. We present two experimental studies that use silent gesture to investigate how noun-verb distinctions develop in the manual modality through two key processes: (i) improvising using novel signals by in…
Is Regularization Uniform across Linguistic Levels? Comparing Learning and Production of Unconditioned Probabilistic Variation in Morphology and Word Order
Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it – removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use on context. Previous studies using artificial language learning experiments have documented regularizi…
Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora
Newberry et al. (Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, Nature 551, 2017) tackle an important but difficult problem in linguistics, the testing of selective theories of language change against a null model of drift. Having applied a test from population genetics (the Frequency Increment Test) to a number of relevant examples, they suggest stochasticity has a previously under-appreciated role in language evolution. We replicate their re…
Simplicity and informativeness in semantic category systems
Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language
The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety of reasons, including purely random sampling ef…
From the world to word order
The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition. One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases). While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this ordering reflects a single underlying representation of noun ph…
Animacy Distinctions Arise from Iterated Learning
Linguistic animacy reflects a particular construal of biological distinctions encountered in the world, passed through cultural and cognitive filters. This study explores the process by which our construal of animacy becomes encoded in the grammars of human languages. We ran an iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of animacy on language transmission. Participants engaged in a simple artificial language learning task in which they…
Convergent transformation and selection in cultural evolution
Momentum in Language Change
Like other socially transmitted traits, human languages undergo cultural evolution. While humans can replicate linguistic conventions to a high degree of fidelity, sometimes established conventions get replaced by new variants, with the gradual replacement following the trajectory of an s-shaped curve. Although previous modelling work suggests that only a bias favoring the replication of new linguistic variants can reliably reproduce the dynamics…
Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals
Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure
Language exhibits striking systematic structure. Words are composed of combinations of reusable sounds, and those words in turn are combined to form complex sentences. These properties make language unique among natural communication systems and enable our species to convey an open-ended set of messages. We provide a cultural evolutionary account of the origins of this structure. We show, using simulations of rational learners and laboratory expe…
How arbitrary is language?
It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary—typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound–meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound–meaning mappings are …
High‐involvement Management Practices, Trade Union Representation and Workplace Performance in Britain
Debates about Britain's productivity performance have often drawn attention to the roles played by working practices and employment relations. In the 1980s and 1990s, trade unions were a prime focus; more recently, attention has turned to high‐involvement management (HIM) practices (also referred to as ‘high‐performance work systems’). We combine the two to investigate the relationships between work organisation, trade union representation and wo…
Emergence of combinatorial structure and economy through iterated learning with continuous acoustic signals
Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals
From the world to word order
The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition. One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases). While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this ordering reflects a single underlying representation of noun ph…
Momentum in Language Change
Like other socially transmitted traits, human languages undergo cultural evolution. While humans can replicate linguistic conventions to a high degree of fidelity, sometimes established conventions get replaced by new variants, with the gradual replacement following the trajectory of an s-shaped curve. Although previous modelling work suggests that only a bias favoring the replication of new linguistic variants can reliably reproduce the dynamics…
The learning bias for cross-category harmony is sensitive to semantic similarity
Cross-category harmony is one of the most well-known typological universals. It describes a trend of consistent alignment of different syntactic categories across phrases within a language. Explanations for this universal vary as to whether cognitive factors play a role or the tendency is instead due to mechanisms of language change alone. In this article we report a series of artificial language learning experiments that aim to test a hypothesiz…
On Computational Models of the Evolution of Music
Evolutionary computing is a powerful tool for studying the origins and evolution of music. In this case, music is studied as an adaptive complex dynamic system and its origins and evolution are studied in the context of the cultural conventions that may emerge under a number of constraints (e.g. psychological, physiological and ecological). This paper introduces three case studies of evolutionary modelling of music. It begins with a model for stu…
Function, Selection, and Innateness
This book explores issues at the core of modern linguistics and cognitive science. Why are all languages similar in some ways and in others utterly different? Why do languages change and change variably? How did the human capacity for language evolve, and how far did it do so as an innate ability? Simon Kirby looks at these questions from a broad perspective, arguing that they can (indeed must) be studied together. The author begins by examining …
The role of I-language in diachronic adaptation
In this excellent paper, Haspelmath highlights the importance of understanding the mechanism that links, on the one hand, functional pressures on language use, and on the other, patterns of grammaticality within and across languages. The author argues that there is a close mapping between these two disparate aspects of language and demonstrates this within the framework of Optimality Theory. This is particularly interesting since OT might be cons…
The Evolutionary Emergence of Language
Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences. As a feature of human social intelligence, language evolution is driven by biologically anomalous l…
The Emergence of Linguistic Structure
Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition
This is a study of how children acquire language and how this affects language change over generations. Written by an international team of experts, the volume proceeds from the basis that we can not only address the language faculty per se within the framework of evolutionary theory, but also the origins and subsequent development of languages themselves; languages evolve via cultural rather than biological transmission on a historical rather th…
On Computational Models of the Evolution of Music
Evolutionary computing is a powerful tool for studying the origins and evolution of music. In this case, music is studied as an adaptive complex dynamic system and its origins and evolution are studied in the context of the cultural conventions that may emerge under a number of constraints (e.g. psychological, physiological and ecological). This paper introduces three case studies of evolutionary modelling of music. It begins with a model for stu…
Author’s response
From UG to Universals
What constitutes linguistic evidence for Universal Grammar (UG)? The principal approach to this question equates UG on the one hand with language universals on the other. Parsimonious and general characterizations of linguistic variation are assumed to uncover features of UG. This paper reviews a recently developed evolutionary approach to language that casts doubt on this assumption: the Iterated Learning Model (ILM). We treat UG as a model of o…
Bias, innateness and domain specificity
For over 35 years, beliefs about the learnability of natural language have acted as roadblocks in the way of further development in linguistics. Rigorous and useful formal work has led to the unwarranted adoption of extreme positions which in turn have tended to stifle collaboration and polarize debate. In his article, MacWhinney suggests a way around such roadblocks – or rather many ways around. He demonstrates that we should look for multiple m…
High‐involvement Management Practices, Trade Union Representation and Workplace Performance in Britain
Debates about Britain's productivity performance have often drawn attention to the roles played by working practices and employment relations. In the 1980s and 1990s, trade unions were a prime focus; more recently, attention has turned to high‐involvement management (HIM) practices (also referred to as ‘high‐performance work systems’). We combine the two to investigate the relationships between work organisation, trade union representation and wo…
Complex Adaptive Systems and the Origins of Adaptive Structure
Language is a product of both biological and cultural evolution. Clues to the origins of key structural properties of language can be found in the process of cultural transmission between learners. Recent experiments have shown that iterated learning by human participants in the laboratory transforms an initially unstructured artificial language into one containing regularities that make the system more learnable and stable over time. Here, we ex…
Language is an adaptive system
This article investigates approaches adopted to explain the role of cultural transmission in linguistic structure. One of the approaches is to build working models of populations made up of individuals that interact and acquire language from each other, which uncovers the general relationship between learning biases/constraints and emergent language universals. There are three broad approaches to this kind of modeling that include computational/r…
The evolution of language
This article discusses the significance of the emergence of language. One of Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry's observations is that, despite their diversity, these transitions have some features in common. In particular, many of the transitions give rise to a new mechanism for the transmission of information. Language, they argue, provides just such a novel mechanism — essentially enabling a system of cultural transmission with unlimited heredit…
How arbitrary is language?
It is a long established convention that the relationship between sounds and meanings of words is essentially arbitrary—typically the sound of a word gives no hint of its meaning. However, there are numerous reported instances of systematic sound–meaning mappings in language, and this systematicity has been claimed to be important for early language development. In a large-scale corpus analysis of English, we show that sound–meaning mappings are …
Emergence of combinatorial structure and economy through iterated learning with continuous acoustic signals
Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure
Language exhibits striking systematic structure. Words are composed of combinations of reusable sounds, and those words in turn are combined to form complex sentences. These properties make language unique among natural communication systems and enable our species to convey an open-ended set of messages. We provide a cultural evolutionary account of the origins of this structure. We show, using simulations of rational learners and laboratory expe…
Momentum in Language Change
Like other socially transmitted traits, human languages undergo cultural evolution. While humans can replicate linguistic conventions to a high degree of fidelity, sometimes established conventions get replaced by new variants, with the gradual replacement following the trajectory of an s-shaped curve. Although previous modelling work suggests that only a bias favoring the replication of new linguistic variants can reliably reproduce the dynamics…
Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals
Animacy Distinctions Arise from Iterated Learning
Linguistic animacy reflects a particular construal of biological distinctions encountered in the world, passed through cultural and cognitive filters. This study explores the process by which our construal of animacy becomes encoded in the grammars of human languages. We ran an iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of animacy on language transmission. Participants engaged in a simple artificial language learning task in which they…
Convergent transformation and selection in cultural evolution
Challenges in detecting evolutionary forces in language change using diachronic corpora
Newberry et al. (Detecting evolutionary forces in language change, Nature 551, 2017) tackle an important but difficult problem in linguistics, the testing of selective theories of language change against a null model of drift. Having applied a test from population genetics (the Frequency Increment Test) to a number of relevant examples, they suggest stochasticity has a previously under-appreciated role in language evolution. We replicate their re…
Simplicity and informativeness in semantic category systems
Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language
The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety of reasons, including purely random sampling ef…
From the world to word order
The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition. One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases). While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this ordering reflects a single underlying representation of noun ph…
Is Regularization Uniform across Linguistic Levels? Comparing Learning and Production of Unconditioned Probabilistic Variation in Morphology and Word Order
Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it – removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use on context. Previous studies using artificial language learning experiments have documented regularizi…
Language and cultural evolution (27 obras) · Linguistics (26 obras) · Computer Science (24 obras) · Psychology (23 obras) · Philosophy (20 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (16 obras) · Cognitive science (12 obras) · Natural language processing (11 obras) · Cognitive psychology (10 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (10 obras)