Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language

By Simon Kirby, Hannah Cornish, Kenny Smith. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2008

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How researchers see this paper

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Pragmatic Language Interpretation as Probabilistic Inference. (2016, unknown): “The processes of change that promote efficient communication have been explored extensively within the iterated learning paradigm [48].”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, methodology): “This is exemplified by a lab-based analogue of the game of “telephone,” in which participants were exposed to a miniature artificial language consisting of simple form-meaning mappings (Kirby et al. 2008).”
Iterated learning for emergent systematicity in VQA (2021, methodology): “The iterated application of this bottleneck, as instantiated by IL, has been demonstrated to cause artificial languages to develop structure in experiments with human participants (Kirby et al., 2008; Silvey et al., 2015).”
Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies (2015, methodology): “Interestingly, similar inductive biases to those observed by Kirby et al. (2008) have been shown in songbirds, where repeated learning constraints generate structure in songs in the same way that repeated learning constraints generate structure in languages (Feher et al. 2009).”
Iterated learning and the evolution of language. (2014, unknown): “Figure 1: An illustration of the iterated artificial language learning method and indicative results, from [47].”