“Language Evolution in the Laboratory”, 2010-09 ():
The historical origins of natural language cannot be observed directly. We can, however, study systems that support language and we can also develop models that explore the plausibility of different hypotheses about how language emerged.
More recently, evolutionary linguists have begun to conduct language evolution experiments in the laboratory, where the emergence of new languages used by human participants can be observed directly. This enables researchers to study both the cognitive capacities necessary for language and the ways in which languages themselves emerge.
One theme that runs through this work is how individual-level behaviors result in population-level linguistic phenomena. A central challenge for the future will be to explore how different forms of information transmission affect this process.
NYT: …Kirby designed an experiment to simulate the evolution of language inside his lab. First, he developed made-up codes to serve as proxies for the disordered collections of words widely believed to have preceded the emergence of structured language, such as random sequences of colored lights or a series of pantomimes. Then he recruited subjects to use the code under a variety of conditions and studied how the code changed. He asked subjects to use the code to solve communication tasks, for example, or to pass the code on to one another as in a game of telephone. He ran the experiment hundreds of times using different parameters on a variety of subjects, including on a colony of baboons living in a semi-naturalistic enclosure equipped with a bank of computers on which they could choose to play his experimental games.
What he found was striking: Regardless of the native tongue of the subjects, or whether they were baboons, college students or robots, the results were the same. When individuals passed the code on to one another, the code became simpler but also less precise. But when they passed it on to one another and also used it to communicate, the code developed a distinct architecture. Random sequences of colored lights turned into richly patterned ones; convoluted, pantomimic gestures for words such as “church” or “police officer” became abstract, efficient signs. “We just saw, spontaneously emerging out of this experiment, the language structures we were waiting for”, Kirby says. His findings suggest that language’s mystical power—its ability to turn the noise of random signals into intelligible formulations—may have emerged from a humble trade-off: between simplicity, for ease of learning, and what Kirby called “expressiveness”, for unambiguous communication.
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