Predictive Structure Emerges During the Generalisation of Kin Terms to New Referents.

Authors

Maisy Hallam, Fiona M Jordan, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith

Published in

Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science. Volume 9. Pages 1431-1466. Epub Sep 09, 2025.

Abstract

Despite cross-linguistic diversity in how kin relations map to terminology, there are constraints on which kin may be categorised together. But what are the constraints on kin term variation, and where do they come from? One proposed constraint is internal co-selection-an evolutionary process where terminological changes in one generation of kin co-occur with parallel changes in other generations. This results in kin categories which are predictable on the basis of other kin categories, a property we call predictive structure. To determine the strength of this constraint, we measured the predictive structure of kinship terminology systems from 731 languages. We found that kinship terminologies exhibit a significant degree of predictive structure, and we argue that its prevalence reflects a cognitive pressure for simplicity imposed during the generalisation of known kin categories to new referent types. We tested this claim using an artificial kin term generalisation task. Our results suggest that people do favour predictive structure when generalising from known kin categories to new referents, but that this preference faces interference from other pressures to distinguish kin by features like gender.

PMID:
41036498
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Oct 2025.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.