Abstract
Cultural attractors enable evolving cultural traits to gain the stability that underpins cumulative cultural evolution, yet the conditions that support their existence are poorly understood. We examine conditions affecting the stability of a salient kind of complex cultural attractor in human language, known as inflectional classes. We present a model of the evolution of inflectional classes, as they are reconstructed across generations via a combination of direct transmission and analogical inference. Parameters examined pertain to diversity of the lexicon and the cog-nitive policies governing inferential reasoning. We discover that persistence of stable inflection classes interacts in complex ways with features which affect how inflection classes are inferred. Thus we contribute to a greater understanding of factors affecting cultural attractors' existence, and to insights into a widespread and complex trait of human language.