How To Invent A Lexicon: The Development Of Shared Symbols In Interaction (1995) [79 citations — 3 self]
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author = {Edwin Hutchins and Brian Hazlehurst and R. Conte (eds},
title = {How To Invent A Lexicon: The Development Of Shared Symbols In Interaction},
booktitle = {Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Life},
year = {1995},
pages = {157--189},
publisher = {UCL Press}
}
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This paper appeared in N. Gilbert and R. Conte (Eds.), Artificial Societies: The computer simulation of social life. London: UCL Press. 2 INTRODUCTION Human language provides, among other things, a mechanism for distinguishing between relevant objects in the natural environment. This mechanism is composed of two components -- forms and meanings -- which must be shared by the community of language users. The lexicon constitutes much of a language's form, but its description as a set of shared formmeaning resources for communication is seldom addressed by formal models of language. This paper presents a simulation model of how shared symbols (form-meaning pairs) can emerge from the interactions of simple cognitive agents in an artificial world. The problem of creating a lexicon from scratch is solved by having cognitive agents capable of organizing themselves internally -- that is, agents which can learn to classify a world of visual phenomena -- share their expressions of visual experience in interaction. The model is seen as an instantiation of a theory of cognition which takes symbols to be a product of inter- and intra-individual organizations of behavior, the result of cultural process. Below, we first present a theoretical stance which has been derived (elsewhere) from empirical investigation of human cognitive phenomena. This stance leads to the articulation of some simple information-processing constraints which must hold for lexicons and their users. In the middle of the paper, we present two simulations employing communities of simple agents which allow us to model how a lexicon could come into existence or emerge from the interactions between agents in an extremely simple world of experience. The model allows us to explore issues which involve interaction bet...
