Cultural Transmission Promotes the Emergence of Statistical Properties That Support Language Learning.

ABSTRACT: 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 r

SUBMITTER: Wolters L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12745064 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature