There is a long history of using transmission chain experiments to look at how behaviour evolves culturally [14, 15, 16, 17, 18], see also Whiten et al., this volume.
We will focus in this review on experimental approaches to cultural evolution as they have been applied to language (Table 1). There is a long history of using transmission chain experiments to look at how behaviour evolves culturally [14, 15, 16, 17, 18], see also Whiten et al., this volume. Kirby et al. [19••] emphasise the applicability of this method to language, which they argue undergoes a process they call iterated learning [20, 21, 22, 23], emphasising the way in which individuals learn from other learners during transmission and usage. Figure 3 gives various different ways in which iterated learning of language has been explored experimentally.