Grammar structure and the dynamics of language evolution

Authors:
Yoosook Lee;Travis C. Collier;Gregory M. Kobele;Edward P. Stabler;Charles E. Taylor
Affiliations:
Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA;Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA;Linguistics Dept., UCLA, Los Angeles, CA;Linguistics Dept., UCLA, Los Angeles, CA;Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
Venue:
ECAL'05 Proceedings of the 8th European conference on Advances in Artificial Life
Year:
2005

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Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure-an iterated learningmodel of the emergence of regularity and irregularity

IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation

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Abstract

The complexity, variation, and change of languages make evident the importance of representation and learning in the acquisition and evolution of language. For example, analytic studies of simple language in unstructured populations have shown complex dynamics, depending on the fidelity of language transmission. In this study we extend these analysis of evolutionary dynamics to include grammars inspired by the principles and parameters paradigm. In particular, the space of languages is structured so that some pairs of languages are more similar than others, and mutations tend to change languages to nearby variants. We found that coherence emerges with lower learning fidelity than predicted by earlier work with an unstructured language space.