Abstract

Human language is learned, symbolic and exhibits syntactic structure, a set of properties which make it unique among naturally-occurring communication systems. How did human language come to be as it is? Language is culturally transmitted and cultural processes may have played a role in shaping language. However, it has been suggested that the cultural transmission of language is constrained by some language-specific innate endowment. The primary objective of the research outlined in this paper is to investigate how such an endowment would influence the acquisition of language and the dynamics of the repeated cultural transmission of language.

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