Perfors Amy, Navarro Daniel J
School of Psychology, University of Adelaide.
Cogn Sci. 2014 May-Jun;38(4):775-93. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12102. Epub 2014 Jan 24.
Human languages vary in many ways but also show striking cross-linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical results demonstrate that Bayesian learners transmitting language to each other through iterated learning will converge on a distribution of languages that depends only on their prior biases about language and the quantity of data transmitted at each point; the structure of the world being communicated about plays no role (Griffiths & Kalish, 2005, 2007). We revisit these findings and show that when certain assumptions about the relationship between language and the world are abandoned, learners will converge to languages that depend on the structure of the world as well as their prior biases. These theoretical results are supported with a series of experiments showing that when human learners acquire language through iterated learning, the ultimate structure of those languages is shaped by the structure of the meanings to be communicated.
人类语言在许多方面存在差异，但也展现出显著的跨语言共性。这些共性为何存在？近期的理论成果表明，通过迭代学习相互传递语言的贝叶斯学习者会趋向于一种语言分布，这种分布仅取决于他们对语言的先验偏好以及每个阶段传递的数据量；所交流的世界的结构并无作用（格里菲思和卡利什，2005年、2007年）。我们重新审视这些发现，并表明当关于语言与世界之间关系的某些假设被摒弃时，学习者会趋向于依赖世界结构以及他们先验偏好的语言。这些理论成果得到了一系列实验的支持，这些实验表明，当人类学习者通过迭代学习习得语言时，这些语言的最终结构会受到要传达的意义结构的影响。
