What is the “alien language” experiment?
Normally, to explain the origins of design in nature, we appeal to Darwinian natural selection. This has led many to believe that humans evolved to have language structure encoded in our genes and in particular, that our brains have adapted to be good at learning language. LEC, on the otherhand, proposes an alternative approach: language has adapted to be good at being learned by us. This can happen because language evolves culturally through being repeatedly learned and used by generations of individuals. This is the process LEC aims to recreate in the laboratory, having previously demonstrated how it works in computer simulations. LEC creates a miniature artificial language involving random strings of syllables paired with alien fruit pictures. A volunteer tries to learn this language, and LEC tests him by asking him to produce what the alien would have said for each picture. This task proves to be very hard as the language has no structure. However, the aim is to see how language ev
