Cultural Emergence of Feature Economy in an Artificial Whistled Language

To investigate the origins of combinatorial structure in speech, we conducted an iterated learning experiment with human participants, studying the transmission of a system of whistled signals. Participants learn and reproduce a system of sounds with a slide whistle and their recall output is the input for the next participant. Vertical transmission causes the system to change and become cumulatively more learnable and more structured, yielding increasing combinatorial structure.