David J. C. Hawkey
2008
Do Individuals Preferences Determine Case Marking Systems?
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, pages 147-154, 2008
What Impact Do Learning Biases have on Linguistic Structures?
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, pages 155-162, 2008
Abstract: Recent work modelling the development of communication systems has suggested that linguistic structure may reflect cognitive structures through the repeated effect of biased learning, the language adapting to conform to the learning preferences of its users. ...
Journal of Theoretical Biology 251(4):570-583, 2008
The 'developmental stress hypothesis' attempts to provide a functional explanation of the evolutionary maintenance of song learning in songbirds. It argues that song learning can be viewed as an indicator mechanism that allows females to use learned features of song as a window ...MORE ⇓
The 'developmental stress hypothesis' attempts to provide a functional explanation of the evolutionary maintenance of song learning in songbirds. It argues that song learning can be viewed as an indicator mechanism that allows females to use learned features of song as a window on a male's early development, a potentially stressful period that may have long-term phenotypic effects. In this paper we formally model this hypothesis for the first time, presenting a population genetic model that takes into account both the evolution of genetic learning preferences and cultural transmission of song. The models demonstrate that a preference for song types that reveal developmental stress can evolve in a population, and that cultural transmission of these song types can be stable, lending more support to the hypothesis.