Cultural evolution creates language-like structure: from humans to humpback whales and beyond
Butts Wynd BWD:09 Butts Wynd, St Andrews, United KingdomAbstract 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 ...