The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most
important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of …

The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only
partly for the attested relations between form and meaning in the languages of the world …

Abstract Zipf's Law of Abbreviation–the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are
simpler than less frequent ones–has been shown to hold at the level of words in many …

Iterated learning describes the process whereby an individual learns their behaviour by
exposure to another individual's behaviour, who themselves learnt it in the same way. It can …

Music exhibits some cross-cultural similarities, despite its variety across the world. Evidence
from a broad range of human cultures suggests the existence of musical universals, here …

A writing system is a graphic code, ie, a system of standardized pairings between symbols
and meanings in which symbols take the form of images that can endure. The visual …

Abstract Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it
apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over …

Highlights•Key design features of language can be explained as the result of cultural
evolution.•Experiments have found that structure emerges through transmission and …

Lewis signaling games are a class of simple communication games for simulating the
emergence of language. In these games, two agents must agree on a communication …

We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of
language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure …