The emergence of linguistic structure: an overview of the iterated learning model
Simulating the evolution of language
A self-organizing spatial vocabulary
Artificial Life
How grammar emerges to dampen combinatorial search in parsing
EELC'06 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication: symbol Grounding and Beyond
Exploring the Roles of Horizontal, Vertical, and Oblique Transmissions in Language Evolution
Adaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems
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Language can be viewed as a complex adaptive system which is continuously shaped and reshaped by the actions of its users as they try to solve communicative problems. To maintain coherence in the overall system, different language elements (sounds, words, grammatical constructions) compete with each other for global acceptance. This paper examines what happens when a language system uses systematic structure, in the sense that certain meaning-form conventions are themselves parts of larger units. We argue that in this case multi-level selection occurs: at the level of elements (e.g. tense affixes) and at the level of larger units in which these elements are used (e.g. phrases). Achieving and maintaining linguistic coherence in the population under these conditions is non-trivial. This paper shows that it is nevertheless possible when agents take multiple levels into account both for processing meaning-form associations and for consolidating the language inventory after each interaction.