The survival of the smallest: Stability conditions for the cultural evolution of compositional language (2001)
| Venue: | In J. Kelemen and P. Sosik (Eds.), Advances in Artificial Life (Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Artificial Life |
| Citations: | 26 - 7 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Brighton01thesurvival,
author = {Henry Brighton and Simon Kirby},
title = {The survival of the smallest: Stability conditions for the cultural evolution of compositional language},
booktitle = {In J. Kelemen and P. Sosik (Eds.), Advances in Artificial Life (Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Artificial Life},
year = {2001},
publisher = {Springer}
}
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Abstract
Abstract. Recent workin the field of computational evolutionary linguistics suggests that the dynamics arising from the cultural evolution of language can explain the emergence of syntactic structure. We build on this workby introducing a model of language acquisition based on the Minimum Description Length Principle. Our experiments show that compositional syntax is most likely to occur under two conditions specific to hominids: (i) A complex meaning space structure, and (ii) the poverty of the stimulus. 1 Introduction: Language as a Complex Adaptive System To what degree can properties of human language be explained by examining the dynamics resulting from the cultural evolution of language? Genetic transmission offers a mechanism for transmitting information down generations [6], and recourse to natural selection for explaining the evolution of language has
