The Emergence of Phonological Compositionality

Abstract

This thesis investigates the effect of cultural transmission of languages on the structure that languages assume, and in particular one aspect: (phonological) compositionality. Based on an Iterated Learning experiment (Verhoef & De Boer (2011)) with an artificial whistled language, that was transmitted from participant to participant, a new experiment was conducted that focusses on the productivity of compositionality. It was established that the compositionality that emerged in the original experiment is productive, which implies that the emergence can be due to a small human learning bias.