Abstract
The human capacity for language is one of our most distinctive characteristics. While communication systems abound in the natural world, human language distinguishes itself in terms of its communicative power, flexibility and complexity. One of the most unusual features of human language, when compared to the communication systems of other species, is the degree to which it involves learning. Just how much of language is innate and how much is learned is an ongoing controversy, but it is undeniable that the specific details of any particular language must be learned anew every generation. We do, of course, bring a great deal of innate resources to bear on our language learning process, and the results these innate biases have on the development of languages may explain a great deal about the structure of the languages we see today. But still every child in every new generation must go through a lengthy process of language acquisition if they are to become normal language users.
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Notes
- 1.
Okanoya defines song complexity as the song linearity, i.e. the total number of unique song notes divided by the number of unique note-to-note transitions. We are not entirely satisfied with this as a measure of complexity, as discussed in section 4.2, but we use the term in Okanoya’s sense throughout this paper.
- 2.
It should be noted that while we use the term ‘note’ throughout this chapter, this is not intended to refer to a particular acoustic note, rather we simply use it to denote an atomic song element that can be reliably differentiated from other elements which appear in the song.
- 3.
Recall that the strongest filter would give a value of 0, and the weakest 1.
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Ritchie, G.R., Kirby, S. (2007). A Possible Role for Selective Masking in the Evolution of Complex, Learned Communication Systems. In: Lyon, C., Nehaniv, C.L., Cangelosi, A. (eds) Emergence of Communication and Language. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84628-779-4_20
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