Evolution of Deixis: Personal Pronouns in an Iterated Learning Experiment

To date, empirical research on language evolution has been based on entirely non-deictic languages. This study presents an experiment using the Iterated Learning Model to establish in what way deixis may affect process of language transmission between generations. The second experiment uses Artificial Language Learning to investigate differences between learnability of holistic non-deictic and deictic compositional languages. The results of these experiments suggest that deictics could not evolve concurrently with non-deictic words in the process of segmentation. Alternative hypothesis, congruent with the holistic protolanguage theory, are being proposed