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First, we provide an overview of the relatively short history of these methods in the context of linguistics and social psychology. This paper will focus on methods which simulate cultural evolution using an experimental approach. As the field of language evolution began to solidify in the late twentieth century, the notion of an influential cultural timescale-crucially interacting with genetic and developmental timescales-became essential to empirical investigations of the evolution of language (Hurford, 1999). While historical linguistics and language change have been vibrant for centuries, the study of language evolution was relatively fallow for most of the twentieth century, following the famous ‘ban’ on studying the evolution of language from the Paris linguistic society (Christiansen and Kirby, 2003) although see notable contributions such as Hockett ( 1960) and Hewes et al. Evolutionary linguistics was an early adopter of a cultural evolutionary framework: many concepts central to cultural evolution have been at the core of historical linguistics and language change for decades (Croft, 2006). Over the last two decades, cultural evolution has emerged as a framework with relevant insights into fields ranging from biology (Mesoudi, 2007) to art history (Sigaki et al. These results have implications for how forms and modalities might constrain language systems, and demonstrate how the use of truly novel alien forms might be extended to address new questions in cultural and linguistic evolution. Results show that properties of this novel form space-in particular, ease of articulation-have specific effects on sequence learning and evolution.
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This experiment uses a new set of graphical symbols called Ferros, which are produced using a virtual palette. This issue is further explored with an iterated experiment which focuses on the role of learning completely novel forms in isolation. This paper provides a brief overview of artificial language learning studies in the context of language evolution, situating them in a framework which focuses on forms used in learning and production. The form modalities used in iterated learning studies have expanded considerably in recent years, but the dynamics of how learning a completely novel form system interact with processes of cultural transmission are only beginning to be explored. Results over the last decade show that some defining features of human language can arise under these experimental conditions, which use iteration to simulate processes of cultural transmission. A cornerstone of experimental studies in language evolution has been iterated artificial language learning: studies where participants learn of artificial ‘alien’ languages, and the product of their learning is then passed onto other participants successively.