Rapidity of fading and the emergence of duality of patterning

![CDATA[Hockett (1960) identified duality of patterning, that is, the fact that few meaningless units generate a large number of meaningful elements, as one of the critical design-features of human languages. Another design-feature identified by Hockett (1960) is rapidity of fading, that is, the fact that linguistic messages are transmitted in a medium over which signals quickly fade. We propose a link between the two design-features. In particular, we hypothesize that the more rapidly signals fade in a medium, the more likely it is that human communication systems emerging over that medium develop duality of patterning. To test this hypothesis, we ran an experiment using the method developed by one of us (Galantucci, 2005) for studying the emergence of human communication systems in the laboratory.]]