CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 107

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Cultural evolution: implications for understanding the human language faculty and its evolution

Smith, Kenny, Kirby, Simon·2008·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
DOI 10.1098/rstb.2008.0145
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Human language is unique among the communication systems of the natural world: it is socially learned and, as a consequence of its recursively compositional structure, offers open-ended communicative potential. The structure of this communication system can be explained as a consequence of the evolution of the human biological capacity for language or the cultural evolution of language itself. We argue, supported by a formal model, that an explanatory account that involves some role for cultural evolution has profound implications for our understanding of the biological evolution of the language faculty: under a number of reasonable scenarios, cultural evolution can shield the language faculty from selection, such that strongly constraining language-specific learning biases are unlikely to evolve. We therefore argue that language is best seen as a consequence of cultural evolution in populations with a weak and/or domain-general language faculty.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1098/rstb.2008.0145

Cites

4 of 4 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • This research shifts some of the explanatory burden for language away from natural selection for language-specific cognitive adaptations, and makes the challenge of explaining the origins of language more manageable.

    “This research is important, as it shifts some of the explanatory burden for language away from natural selection for language-specific cognitive adaptations, and makes the challenge of explaining the origins of language more manageable (Smith and Kirby, 2008; Kirby et al., 2007, 2008, 2015).”

    From The origins of language in teaching (2017) · cites this paper as Smith and Kirby, 2008

  • Mathematical modeling has established that key properties of language, for instance compositionality, could evolve through cultural evolution.

    “The cultural evolution of language has been studied through mathematical modeling, and researchers have established that key properties of language, for instance compositionality, could evolve in this manner (Smith and Kirby, 2008; Kirby et al. 2007).”

    From The origins of language in teaching (2017) · cites this paper as Smith and Kirby, 2008

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 64

  1. 10.2307/412063 · DOI
  2. 10.1086/276408 · DOI · Paper page
  3. 10.1016/S1364-6613(97)01006-1 · DOI
  4. Bloom P How children learn the meanings of words. 2000 Cambridge MA:MIT Press. · DOI
  5. 10.1162/106454602753694756 · DOI
  6. Brighton H. 2003 Simplicity as a driving force in linguistic evolution PhD thesis The University of Edinburgh.
  7. Brighton H, 2005, Language origins: perspectives on evolution, 291, 10.1093/oso/9780199279036.003.0017 · DOI · Paper page
  8. 10.1353/lan.2000.0015 · DOI
  9. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199244843.003.0016 · DOI
  10. Catchpole C.K& Slater P.J.B Bird song: biological themes and variations. 1995 Cambridge UK:Cambridge University Press.
  11. Chomsky N Rules and representations. 1980 London UK:Basil Blackwell. · DOI
  12. Christiansen M. & Chater N. In press. Language as shaped by the brain. Behav. Brain Sci .
  13. Deacon T The symbolic species. 1997 London UK:Penguin.
  14. 10.1016/S0065-3454(08)60384-8 · DOI
  15. 10.1037/0096-3445.134.3.406 · DOI
  16. 10.1006/anbe.1993.1158 · DOI
  17. 10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01494-7 · DOI
  18. 10.1126/science.1089401 · DOI
  19. 10.1038/nature04675 · DOI
  20. 10.1163/156853900502330 · DOI
  21. 10.1111/1467-9280.00476 · DOI
  22. Griffiths T.L, 2005, Proc. 27th Annual Conf. of the Cognitive Science Society, 827
  23. 10.1080/15326900701326576 · DOI
  24. 10.1098/rstb.2008.0146 · DOI · Paper page
  25. 10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00132-3 · DOI · Paper page
  26. 10.1038/scientificamerican0960-88 · DOI
  27. 10.1080/15475441.2005.9684215 · DOI
  28. Hurford J.R, 1990, Logical issues in language acquisition, 85, 10.1515/9783110870374-007 · DOI
  29. Jackendoff R Foundations of language: brain meaning grammar evolution. 2002 Oxford UK:Oxford University Press. · DOI
  30. Kinsella A. R. In press. Language evolution and syntactic theory . Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
  31. Kirby S Function selection and innateness: the emergence of language universals. 1999 Oxford UK:Oxford University Press. · DOI
  32. 10.1017/CBO9780511486524.006 · DOI
  33. 10.1162/106454602320184248 · DOI
  34. Kirby S. Cornish H. & Smith K. 2008 Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: an experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105 10 681–10 686. (doi:10.1073/pnas.0707835105). · DOI · Paper page
  35. Krifka M, 2001, The MIT encyclopaedia of the cognitive sciences, 152
  36. 10.1038/176006a0 · DOI
  37. 10.1038/246015a0 · DOI · Paper page
  38. Maynard Smith J& Szathmáry E The major transitions in evolution. 1995 Oxford UK:Oxford University Press.
  39. 10.1016/S0010-0285(03)00128-2 · DOI
  40. 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2003.12.002 · DOI
  41. 10.1073/pnas.96.14.8028 · DOI
  42. 10.1098/rspb.1999.0898 · DOI
  43. 10.1038/35006635 · DOI
  44. 10.1126/science.291.5501.114 · DOI
  45. 10.1196/annals.1298.026 · DOI
  46. 10.1016/j.jtbi.2004.10.025 · DOI
  47. 10.1017/S0140525X00081061 · DOI · Paper page
  48. Pullum G.K, 2002, Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments, Linguist. Rev, 19, 9
  49. 10.1126/science.274.5294.1926 · DOI · Paper page
  50. 10.1037/0096-3445.115.3.211 · DOI
  51. Slater P.J.B, 2005, The encyclopedia of language and linguistics
  52. 10.1016/j.jtbi.2003.12.016 · DOI
  53. 10.1142/S0219525903001055 · DOI
  54. Stokoe W.C Sign language structure. 1960 Silver Spring MD:Linstok Press.
  55. 10.1007/BF00276549 · DOI
  56. 10.1016/B978-012273965-1/50016-9 · DOI
  57. 10.1075/eoc.1.2.04tom · DOI
  58. Waddington C.H The evolution of an evolutionist. 1975 Ithaca NY:Cornell University Press.
  59. 10.1038/nature04023 · DOI
  60. 10.1016/S0271-5309(97)00033-5 · DOI
  61. 10.1007/s002650100383 · DOI
  62. 10.1006/anbe.2001.1914 · DOI
  63. Zuidema W. H. 2003 How the poverty of the stimulus solves the poverty of the stimulus. In Advances in neural information processing systems 15 ( Proceedings of NIPS ‘02 ) (eds S. Becker S. Thrun & K. Obermayer) pp. 51–58. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
  64. Zuidema W. H. & de Boer B. In press. The evolution of combinatorial phonology. J. Phon .

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Metadata

Authors
Smith, K., & Kirby, S.
Venue
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Publisher
The Royal Society
Published
2008-09-19
Volume
363
Issue
1509
Pages
3591-3603
ISSN
  • 0962-8436
  • 1471-2970
DOI
10.1098/rstb.2008.0145
Cited by
107
References
4
Language
en
Licence
royalsociety.org/journals/ethics-policies/data-sharing-mining/ (tdm)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review