We discuss recent findings suggesting that non-human animals lack memory for stimulus sequences, and therefore do not represent the order of stimuli faithfully. These observations have far-reaching consequences for animal cognition, neuroscience, and studies of the evolution of language and culture. This is because, if non-human animals do not remember or process information about order faithfully, then it is unlikely that non-human animals perform mental simulations, construct mental world models, have episodic memory, or transmit culture faithfully. If this suggested sequence bottleneck proves to be a prevalent characteristic of animal memory systems, as suggested by recent work, it would require a re-examination of some influential concepts and ideas.

This study explores the cognitive mechanisms underlying human language acquisition through grammar induction by a minimal cognitive architecture, with a short and flexible sequence memory as its most central feature. We use reinforcement learning for the task of identifying sentences in a stream of words from artificial languages. Results demonstrate the model’s ability to identify frequent and informative multi-word chunks, reproducing characteristics of natural language acquisition. The model successfully navigates varying degrees of linguistic complexity, exposing efficient adaptation to combinatorial challenges through the reuse of sequential patterns. The emergence of parsimonious tree structures suggests an optimization for the sentence identification task, balancing economy and information. The cognitive architecture reflects aspects of human memory systems and decision-making processes, enhancing its cognitive plausibility. While the model exhibits limitations in generalization and semantic representation, its minimalist nature offers insights into some fundamental mechanisms of language learning. Our study demonstrates the power of this simple architecture and stresses the importance of sequence memory in language learning. Since other animals do not seem to have faithful sequence memory, this may be a key to understanding why only humans have developed complex languages.

Human language is unique in its compositional, open-ended, and sequential form, and its evolution is often solely explained by advantages of communication. However, it has proven challenging to identify an evolutionary trajectory from a world without language to a world with language, especially while at the same time explaining why such an advantageous phenomenon has not evolved in other animals. Decoding sequential information is necessary for language, making domain-general sequence representation a tentative basic requirement for the evolution of language and other uniquely human phenomena. Here, using formal evolutionary analyses of the utility of sequence representation we show that sequence representation is exceedingly costly and that current memory systems found in animals may prevent abilities necessary for language to emerge. For sequence representation to evolve, flexibility allowing for ignoring irrelevant information is necessary. Furthermore, an abundance of useful sequential information and extensive learning opportunities are required, two conditions that were likely fulfilled early in human evolution. Our results provide a novel, logically plausible trajectory for the evolution of uniquely human cognition and language, and support the hypothesis that human culture is rooted in sequential representational and processing abilities.

The present paper deals with contact-induced change in existential constructions in the variety of Portuguese spoken in Cabinda, Angola. Portuguese is the official language of Angola, and the officially adopted norm is European Standard Portuguese. The focus of the analysis is on the use of the possessive verb ter ‘to have’ in existential constructions, rather than the existential haver ‘to exist’, which is the standard form in Portugal. The analysis is based on data from 40 interviews with 20 male and 20 female high school Cabinda students between 18 and 30 years of age. The aim is to investigate the role of language contact in the emergence of existential sentences with ter, as well as to verify if the use of ter in existential constructions in Cabinda has the same linguistic constraints as in Brazilian Portuguese. The paper also analyzes social factors related to multilingualism in order to discuss how social and linguistic constraints interact in shaping new varieties, such as Cabinda Portuguese. The conclusion is that the use of ter sentences as existentials in Cabinda Portuguese may be an effect resulting from the confluence of two linguistic factors: (i) changes linked with the pro-drop parameter in Portuguese emerging in Angola, and (ii) the transference of a grammatical property from Bantu languages to Portuguese, specifically, the morphological identity of possessive and existential verbs. Moreover, the only registered social influence over the presence of existential ter constructions is the level of use of Bantu languages, a finding that does not rule out that these constructions may initially have been triggered by more general acquisition effects.

In this paper, we address the question of what minimal cognitive features are necessary for learning to process and extract grammatical structure from language. We build a minimalistic computational model containing only the two core features chunking and sequence memory and test its capacity to identify sentence borders and parse sentences in two artificial languages. The model has no prior linguistic knowledge and learns only by reinforcement of the identification of meaningful units. In simulations, the model turns out to be successful at its tasks, indicating that it is a good starting point for an extended model with ability to process and extract grammatical structure from larger corpora of natural language. We conclude that a model with the features chunking and sequence memory, that should in the future be complemented with the ability to establish hierarchical schemas, has the potential of describing the emergence of grammatical categories through language learning.

Language change is accelerated by language contact, especially by contact that occurs when a group of speakers shifts from one language to another. This has commonly been explained by linguistic innovation occurring during second language acquisition. This hypothesis is based on historical reconstructions of instances of contact and has not been formally tested on empirical data. In this paper, we construct an agent-based model to formalize the hypothesis that second language speakers are responsible for accelerated language change during language shift. We compare model predictions to a unique combination of diachronic linguistic and demographic data from Maputu, Mozambique. The model correctly predicts an increased proportional use of the novel linguistic variants during the period we study. We find that a modified version of the model is a better fit to one of our two datasets and discuss plausible reasons for this. As a general conclusion concerning typological differences between contact-induced and non-contact-induced language change, we suggest that multiple introductions of a new linguistic variant by different individuals may be the mechanism by which language contact accelerates language change.

The present study analyzes the speech of the Afro-Brazilian rural community of Cafundó, located 150 km from São Paulo. Between 1978 and 1988, when the analyzed data were collected, the community had a population of 80 people, descendants of two former slaves, who were sisters and inherited the lands of their owner. In a book published in 1996, Carlos Vogt and Peter Fry (with the collaboration of Robert Slenes) argue that the variety denominated Cupópia presents structures of regional Portuguese, and that part of the vocabulary is of Bantu origin. The present paper focuses on morphosintactic aspects and discusses copulaomission, the use of copula instead of the possessive verb, unexpected word order in Portuguese, nouns without determinant in subject position, the use of definite articles in prepositional prepositional phrases functioning as adjectival locutions, as well as the variable agreement in the noun phrases and the agreement between the subject and the verb. The results indicate that the grammatical features of Cupopia do not fully coincide with those observed in the Portuguese spoken by the same individuals, but are shared with more restructured linguistic varieties than the ones spoken in rural areas of the interior of the State of São Paulo.

O presente estudo analisa a fala da comunidade rural afro-brasileira do Cafundó, situada a 150 km da cidade de São Paulo. Entre 1978 e 1988, período em que os dados aqui analisados foram coletados, a comunidade contava com carca de 80 pessoas, descendentes de duas ex escravas, irmãs, que herdaram as terras do seu dono. O livro publicado em 1996 por Carlos Vogt e Peter Fry (com a colaboração de Robert Slenes) defende que a variedade denominada Cupópia apresenta estruturas do Português regional e que parte do vocabulário é de origem Bantu. A análise morfossintática discute os casos de a ausência de cópula, o uso da cópula em lugar do verbo possessivo, a ordem das palavras incomum no português, os substantivos sem determinante na posição de sujeito, o uso de artigos definidos em SNs preposicionais que correspondem a locuções adjetivas, bem como a concordância variável no SN e a concordância entre o sujeito e o verbo. Os resultados indicam que as características gramaticais da Cupópia não coincidem totalmente com os traços registrados no Português falado pelos mesmos indivíduos, mas que são compartilhadas com variedades linguísticas mais restruturadas do que o Português falado em zonas rurais do interior do Estado de São Paulo. 

In the study of cultural evolution, human culture is generally assumed to be cumulative, implying increasing complexity and diversity over time (Enquist et al. 2011, Lewis & Laland 2012). Recent studies suggest that evolutionary mechanisms operate differently in different cultural domains (Tamariz et al. 2016), but it has not been discussed whether all mechanisms result in cumulativity. Experiments have shown that compositional language structure emerge as a trade-off between learnability and expressivity (Kirby et al. 2008, 2015), but there is no evidence of languages generally becoming more compositional, or regular, over time. As all modern natural languages are expressive enough for human communicative needs and compressed enough for generational transmission, we suggest that linguistic complexity is 19 not currently cumulative but breaks down and builds up in cycles triggered by demographically determined variation in learnability and expressivity pressures. We focus on pidgins, a special case of natural languages where the expressivity pressure is presumably weaker and learnability pressure stronger than in other languages. We compare pidgins to creoles, where both expressivity and learnability pressures are presumably high, and non-contact languages where the learnability pressure is presumably lower, allowing for more complexity. We analyze compiled material from spoken and written pidgins, spoken creoles and non-contact languages and a parallel bible corpus, applying two complexity measures: the relation between word length and frequency, and pronominal morphology. We observe a smaller degree of exponentiality in the negative correlation between word length and frequency in pidgins than in their lexifiers, likely reflecting the loss of short and common grammatical words. Creoles expose a higher exponentiality in this correlation, which may reflect a newly built up analytical grammar. For pronouns, we observe expected reduced marking of person, number, case and gender in pidgins, increasing in creoles, being highest in non-contact languages.

The present paper focuses on the speech of a rural Afro-Brazilian community called Cafundó, situated 150 km from São Paulo. In 1978, when linguistic data were collected, the community constituted approximately eighty individuals, descendants of two slave women who inherited their owners’ proprieties. According to earlier studies, when the inhabitants of Cafundó spoke in their supposed ‘African language,’ Cupópia, they used structures borrowed from Portuguese and a vocabulary of possible African origin. A lexical analysis shows that the etymologies match historical and demographical data, indicating that speakers of varieties of Kimbundu, Kikongo and Umbundu dominated in the community. Through a morphosyntactic analysis, specific features were found in the data, such as copula absence and variable agreement patterns. By showing that some of Cupópia’s specific grammatical features are not derived from the Portuguese spoken by the same speakers but are instead shared with more restructured varieties, this paper defends the hypothesis that this lexically driven in-group code is not simply a regional variety of Portuguese with a number of African-derived words.