Experimental Psychology Seminar - Inbal Arnon
Cultural evolution creates language-like structure: from humans to humpback whales
Experimental Psychology Seminar - Inbal Arnon
13 May 2025, 13:00 – 14:00
Abstract: All known languages are made up of statistically coherent sequences - words - whose frequency distribution follows a power law known as a Zipfian distribution. Despite the ubiquity of these features across languages their origins are poorly understood. In this talk, I will argue that they arise because they facilitate learning and therefore emerge through the process of cultural transmission of language. I will present a set of results on the learnability sources and consequences of such distributions in human language. I will then summarise results from a joint project with Simon Kirby (University of Edinburgh) in which non-linguistic sequences evolve as they are transmitted from generation to generation of participants. By using insights from infant speech segmentation, we analyse those sequences and observe the emergence of Zipf’s law over generations. This work makes a prediction that we should find Zipfian distribution of statistically coherent sequences wherever systems culturally evolve, including in other species. However, so far these features have only been found in humans. In the last part of the talk, I will turn to the culturally evolving song of humpback whales and apply the same analytic technique to 8 years of whale recordings. In joint work with Simon Kirby and Ellen Garland (University of St. Andrews), we show for the first time in another species that these characteristic statistical properties are indeed present in whale song. By doing so, we demonstrate a deep commonality between two species separated by tens of millions of years of evolution but united by both having culture.
Zoom Link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/94198093273?pwd=bCRaiADABgvIRjA46FazTh77jIvpBd.1
Meeting ID: 941 9809 3273
Passcode: 886121
Inbal Arnon
University of Jerusalem
Prof. Arnon has a PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science (2011, Stanford University), and is currently a Full Professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University. Her research program, which lies on the interaction of Linguistics, Psychology, and Cognitive Science, focuses on understanding human’s unique ability to learn, use, and develop language, and more specifically, on understanding how children acquire language, how they differ from adults in doing so, and how learnability pressures shape the emergence and structure of human language. Prof. Arnon has worked extensively on first language acquisition, developing a novel framework for understanding why children are better language learners than adults, with applied implications for human and machine learning (The Starting Big Approach, see Arnon, 2021 for a review). In her current projects, she asks whether learning pressures and constraints can explain why languages look the way they do, how language evolved, and how insights from child learning can be used to study non-human communication.