Group cohesion, cooperation and synchrony in a social model of language evolution

Abstract

Experiments conducted in a simulation environment demonstrated that both implicit coordination and explicit cooperation among agents leads to the rapid emergence of systems with key properties of natural languages, even under very pessimistic assumptions about shared information states. In this setting, cooperation is shown to elicit more rapid convergence on greater levels of understanding in populations that do not expand, but which grow more intimate, than in groups that may expand and contract. There is a smaller but significant effect of synchronized segmentation of utterances. The models show distortions in synonymy and homonymy rates that are exhibited by natural languages, but relative conformity with what one would rationally build into an artificial language to achieve successful communication: understanding correlates with synonymy rather than homonymy. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.