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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 a multi-agent Iterated Learning Model of the emergence of compositionality, a fundamental structural property of language. Our key results 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.

@unpublished{smith02languageEvolution,
      author={Kenny Smith and H. Brighton and S. Kirby},
      title={Language Evolution in a Multi-agent Model: the cultural emergence of compositional structure},
      year={2002},
      url={http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~kenny/publications/sbk.ps.gz},
      note={}
}