Monica Tamariz

Heriot-Watt University · Psychology

Humans are fundamentally defined by our socially transmitted, often long-lived, sophisticated cultural traits. The nature of cultural transmission is the subject of ongoing debate: while some emphasize that it is a biased, transformational process, others point out that high-fidelity transmission is required to explain the quintessentially cumulati...

We report a method of quantifying the systematicity between the visual form of letters and their canonical pronunciations. We measure the visual distance between letters as Hausdorff distance and the phonological distance between their canonical pronunciations as feature-edit distance and Euclidean distance, operating over phonological features. We...

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of (a) participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and (b) individual participan...