Complex Systems in Language Evolution: the cultural emergence of compositional structure (2003) [8 citations — 0 self]
by
Kenny Smith
,
Henry Brighton
,
Simon Kirby
Advances in Complex Systems
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@INPROCEEDINGS{Smith03complexsystems,
author = {Kenny Smith and Henry Brighton and Simon Kirby},
title = {Complex Systems in Language Evolution: the cultural emergence of compositional structure},
booktitle = {Advances in Complex Systems},
year = {2003},
pages = {537--558}
}
author = {Kenny Smith and Henry Brighton and Simon Kirby},
title = {Complex Systems in Language Evolution: the cultural emergence of compositional structure},
booktitle = {Advances in Complex Systems},
year = {2003},
pages = {537--558}
}
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Abstract:
Language arises from the interaction of three complex adaptive systems | biological evolution, learning, and culture. We focus here on cultural evolution, and present an Iterated Learning Model of the emergence of compositionality, a fundamental structural property of language. Our main result is to show that the poverty of the stimulus available to language learners leads to a pressure for linguistic structure. When there is a bottleneck on cultural transmission, only a language which is generalisable from sparse input data is stable. Language itself evolves on a cultural time-scale, and compositionality is language's adaptation to stimulus poverty.
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