Children's narrow learning bottleneck accelerates the emergence of statistical properties of language

2026/06/23 by Lucie Wolters, Simon Kirby, Inbal Arnon · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Psychology · Physics and Astronomy · #Language and cultural evolution #Language Development and Disorders #Origins and Evolution of Life

paper · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2026.106622

Abstract

Learners are limited in how much they can learn when a language is passed from one generation to the next. This transmission bottleneck is thought to play a crucial role in shaping language by promoting the emergence of systematic structure that enhances learnability. Prior work has investigated the impact of transmission bottlenecks by experimentally manipulating how much input learners receive. However, in natural language learning, bottlenecks can also result from learners' cognitive limitations. Here, we take a naturalistic approach to testing the effects of such learning bottlenecks by comparing cultural transmission in two populations that differ in their cognitive capacities: children and adults. Specifically, we investigate the emergence of two cross-linguistic statistical properties that were shown to facilitate learning: statistically coherent units, and Zipfian frequency distributions. Transmission chains of child and adult learners observed and reproduced sets of colour sequences that were produced by the preceding participant, simulating the process of cultural transmission. For both age groups, initially random sets of sequences evolved to have statistically coherent units with a Zipfian frequency distribution, but crucially, these statistical properties emerged faster with children. In addition, both children and adults learned the final child-generated sequence sets more easily than the adult-generated ones. Together, these findings suggest that children's more limited cognitive capacities create a narrower learning bottleneck, which in turn accelerates the emergence of statistical properties that enhance learnability. These results provide novel evidence that cognitive constraints can modulate the emergence of systematic structure that facilitates learning.

Citations

• The relations between children’s communicative perspective-taking and executive functioning
• Whale song shows language-like statistical structure
• Infant Statistical Learning
• Transmission and diffusion
• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Using Social Impact Theory to simulate language change

Discussions

• Children’s limited cognitive capacity creates a learning bottleneck that accelerates the emergence of systematic language structures, producing sequences both children and adults find easier to learn. [bsky, 13 points, 0 comments]

Related

• Cultural Transmission Promotes the Emergence of Statistical Properties That Support Language Learning
• Statistical Learning of Language: A Meta‐Analysis Into 25 Years of Research
• The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: Theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis
• Cognitive Limits Shape Language Statistics
• Language learning as language use: A cross-linguistic model of child language development.