Abstract
This paper investigates the interaction between cultural evolution and biological evolution in the emergence of phonemic coding in speech. It is observed that our nearest relatives, the primates, use holistic utterances, whereas humans use phonemic utterances. It can therefore be argued that our last common ancestor used holistic utterances and that these must have evolved into phonemic utterances. This involves co-evolution between a repertoire of speech sounds and adaptations to using phonemic speech. The culturally transmitted system of speech sounds influences the fitness of the agents and could conceivably block the transition from holistic to phonemic speech. This paper investigates this transition using a computer model in which agents that can either use holistic or phonemic utterances co-evolve with a lexicon of words. The lexicon is adapted by the speakers to conform to their preferences. It is shown that although the dynamics of the transition are changed, the population still ends up of agents that use phonemic speech.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Houston, D.M., Jusczyk, P.W.: The role of talker-specific information in word segmentation by infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 26, 1570–1582 (2000)
Jackendoff, R.: Foundations of language. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002)
Mitani, J.C., Marler, P.: A phonological analysis of male gibbon singing behavior. Behaviour 109, 20–45 (1989)
Cooper, F.S., Delattre, P.C., Liberman, A.M., Borst, J.M., Gerstman, L.J.: Some Experiments on the Perception of Synthetic Speech Sounds. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 24, 597–606 (1952)
Oudeyer, P.-Y.: Phonemic coding might be a result of sensory-motor coupling dynamics. In: Hallam, J. (ed.) Proceedings of the International conference on the simulation of adaptive behavior (SAB), pp. 406–416. MIT Press, Edinburgh (2002)
Hurford, J.: The evolution of the critical period for language acquisition. Cognition 40, 159–201 (1991)
Steels, L.: Synthesising the origins of language and meaning using co-evolution, self-organisation and level formation. In: Hurford, J.R., Michael, S.-K., Knight, C. (eds.) Approaches to the Evolution of Language, pp. 384–404. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998)
Smith, K., Kirby, S., Brighton, H.: Iterated Learning: a framework for the emergence of language. Artificial Life 9, 371–386 (2003)
Zuidema, W.: How the poverty of the stimulus solves the poverty of the stimulus. In: Becker, S., Thrun, S., Obermayer, K. (eds.) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 15, pp. 51–58. MIT Press, Cambridge (2003)
Nowak, M.A., Krakauer, D.: The evolution of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96, 8028–8033 (1999)
Shannon, C.E.: A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell system technical journal 27, 379–423, 623–656 (1948)
Maynard Smith, J.: Models in Ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1974)
De Boer, B.: The origins of vowel systems. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2001)
De Boer, B.: Self organization in vowel systems. Journal of Phonetics 28, 441–465 (2000)
Geissmann: Duet-splitting and the evolution of gibbon songs. Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 77, 57–76 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
de Boer, B. (2005). Cultural and Biological Evolution of Phonemic Speech. In: Capcarrère, M.S., Freitas, A.A., Bentley, P.J., Johnson, C.G., Timmis, J. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3630. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11553090_62
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11553090_62
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28848-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31816-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)