ERIC Number: EJ1493185
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Dec
Pages: 25
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0364-0213
EISSN: EISSN-1551-6709
Available Date: 2025-12-28
Cultural Transmission Promotes the Emergence of Statistical Properties That Support Language Learning
Lucie Wolters1; Simon Kirby2; Inbal Arnon3
Cognitive Science, v49 n12 e70153 2025
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 replicate and strengthen previous findings using a browser-based experimental procedure with a smaller dataset, demonstrating the robustness of these findings and creating a methodological platform for future research. Second, we show that learners are sensitive to the sequence information that emerges through cultural transmission by showing that reaction times are faster for higher transitional probabilities. These findings suggest that the learning of fine-grained sequence information drives the emergence of statistically coherent units with a Zipfian frequency distribution. Third, we ask whether another cross-linguistic property of language, Zipf's law of Abbreviation, emerges over cultural transmission. We find that the law is present in the sets produced by participants but that it does not evolve over transmission. We discuss how these findings support the proposal that production pressures alone may be sufficient to explain the consistently weak frequency-length correlation observed in natural language.
Descriptors: Language Acquisition, Cultural Influences, Word Frequency, Learning Processes, Reaction Time, Statistical Distributions
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; 2Centre for Language Evolution, School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh; 3Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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