COMPLEX SYSTEMS IN LANGUAGE EVOLUTION: THE CULTURAL EMERGENCE OF COMPOSITIONAL STRUCTURE

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 generalizable 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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Year of publication:	2003
Authors:	SMITH, KENNY ; BRIGHTON, HENRY ; KIRBY, SIMON
Published in:	Advances in Complex Systems (ACS). - World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., ISSN 1793-6802. - Vol. 06.2003, 04, p. 537-558
Publisher:	World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Subject:	Language \| cultural evolution \| compositionality

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Extent:	application/pdf text/html
Type of publication:	Article
Source:	RePEc - Research Papers in Economics

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10004977703