Issues of literacy, issues of modality: Language evolution from a cultural perspective

Acknowledgements First of all, many thanks to Mónica Tamaríz, who has been all that a supervisor should be – knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and encouraging. Thanks also to Simon Kirby, co-supervisor, for his help and guidance throughout the year. Thanks to Erin Brown, for her patient willingness to offer advice and help. I owe a debt of gratitude to Eddie Dubourg for his expert technical help and advice. Thanks also to Ziggy Campbell for help with recordings and equipment used in the experiments. Thanks to the team in the PPLS postgraduate office – Toni Noble, Lynsey Buchanan, and Katie Keltie, for their cheerful professionalism from day one of this year-long course. Thanks to my classmates and friends for a great year. Finally, thanks and love to Sr. Cáit O'Dwyer and my immediate family for their unstinting support, encouragement and enthusiasm throughout this process as with all things. 3 Abstract Recent research has identified a systematicity bias in human language. That is, humans show a cognitive bias towards compositionality in language. It has previously been suggested that literacy may prompt or enhance this bias in learners. This dissertation presents the results of an experiment which aimed to isolate possible literacy effects of this systematicity bias, using a musical language paradigm. Results indicate that literacy alone may not be sufficient for the development of this systematicity bias. However, differences between musical and orthographical literacy were identified, and may have contributed to these results. A further experiment attempted to address the validity of using such a musical language paradigm, and results indicated that referential meaning is indeed relevant for artificial language learning. Thus, the validity of this paradigm may fall under question, and so, researchers must be cautious to consider both literacy and referential meaning when employing such a paradigm.