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.

语言通过一个学习和使用的循环持续存在：您通过沉浸在您的语言社区中使用的语言中来学习一种语言，并且在使用语言进行交流时，您会产生更多的语言数据，其他人可能会反过来学习这些数据。由于这些学习和使用过程中的错误和创新，语言会随着历史时间的推移而发生变化；本文回顾了已经开发出来的实验和计算方法，以检验这样的假设，即那些相同的学习和使用过程负责创建所有人类语言共享的基本结构属性，包括使语言成为如此强大的工具的一些设计特征用于交流。