Language as a Complex Adaptive System
PPSN VI Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature
Verifying Theories of Language Acquisition Using Computer Models of Language Evolution
Adaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems
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Language has been argued to exhibit a complex system behavior. In our approach, the syntactic relations of dependency between words have been represented as networks. In a previous study, two English infants' corpora of utterances were analyzed longitudinally, offering a view of the ontogeny of syntax. Abrupt changes were detected in the growth pattern of the Giant Connected Component - the largest connected set of nodes in a graph. In the present study, we have further analyzed and compared three more infants, from the CHILDES database, learning three different languages: Dutch, German and Spanish. Our results show, along with previous work with English-speaking infants, that all three infants' syntactic networks change their topology in a similar way, from tree-like networks to small-world networks. This change happens at a similar period in all three infants (between ~700 and ~800 days), regardless of the language they acquire. Our study also shows that the hubs - the most connected nodes in these small-world networks - are always the so-called functional words, which, according to linguistic theory, just contribute to the syntactic structure of human language. The emergence of these hubs happens abruptly, following a logarithmic growth pattern. This developmental pattern challenges usage-based theories of language acquisition and suggests that syntactic development is driven by the growth of the lexicon.