Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One design feature of human language is its combinatorialphonology, allowing it to form an unbounded set of mean-ingful utterances from a finite set of building blocks. Re-cent experiments suggest how this feature can evolve culturallywhen continuous signals are repeatedly transmitted betweengenerations. Because the building blocks of a combinatorialsystem lack independent meaning, combinatorial structure ap-pears to be in conflict with iconicity, another property salientin language evolution. To investigate the developmental tra-jectory of iconicity during the evolution of combinatoriality,we conducted an iterated learning experiment where partici-pants learned auditory signals produced using a virtual slidewhistle. We find that iconicity emerges rapidly but is gradu-ally lost over generations as combinatorial structure continuesto increase. This suggests that iconicity biases, whose pres-ence was revealed in a signal guessing experiment, manifest innuanced ways. We discuss implications of these findings fordifferent ideas about how biases for iconicity and combinato-riality interact in language evolution.