Holistic or Synthetic Protolanguage: Evidence from Iterated Learning Ofwhistled Signals

Many arguments have been proposed in favor of and against the idea of protolanguage as a set of holistic utterances that were later segmented into words. This paper presents data from a human iterated learning experiment which corroborates arguments in favor of holistic protolanguage and forms a counterexample to some of the arguments that were proposed against it. This experiment involves iterated learning and recall of a set of (initially) holistic whistles produced with a slide whistle. Over generations, the whistle sets become easier to learn and discrete, combinatorial structure emerges.