Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report the results of a large-scale (N=1571) experiment toinvestigate whether spoken words can emerge from the processof repeated imitation. Participants played a version of the chil-dren’s game “Telephone”. The first generation was asked toimitate recognizable environmental sounds (e.g., glass break-ing, water splashing); subsequent generations imitated the im-itators for a total of 8 generations. We then examined whetherthe vocal imitations became more stable and word-like, re-tained a resemblance to the original sound, and became moresuitable as learned category labels. The results showed (1) theimitations became progressively more word-like, (2) even af-ter 8 generations, they could be matched above chance to theenvironmental sound that motivated them, and (3) imitationsfrom later generations were more effective as learned cate-gory labels. These results show how repeated imitation cancreate progressively more word-like forms while retaining asemblance of iconicity.