Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One key feature of language is duality of patterning, the ability to build utterances from individually meaningful units(morphemes), which are themselves formed by combining meaningless primitives (phonemes). Recent experimental workhas demonstrated that these primitives can emerge through repeated acquisition and transmission of initially unstructuredinput across learners. Here we address open questions about the nature and interplay of different constraints on learningthat are hypothesized to explain this phenomenon. We consider a set of experiments (Verhoef, 2012; 2016) where par-ticipants produced auditory signals using a slide whistle. Following recent advances in Bayesian program learning, ourprobabilistic model treats the acquisition problem as inference over the latent causes that gave rise to the whistle signals.We will describe computer simulations that explore how different learning constraints, operationalized as inductive biasesin the model, give rise to structurally different ’languages’ and how well different model variants account for the citedexperimental data.