Languages persist through a cycle of learning and use: You learn a language through immersion in the language used in your linguistic community, and in using language to communicate, you produce further linguistic data, which other people might learn from in turn. Languages change over historical time as a result of errors and innovations in these processes of learning and use; this article reviews experimental and computational methods that have been developed to test the hypothesis that those same processes of learning and use are responsible for creating the fundamental structural properties shared by all human languages, including some of the design features that make language such a powerful tool for communication.
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