Self-organization of a lexicon in a structured society of agents

Abstract

The naming game is a formal mechanism that describes the development of a lexicon in a society of culturally interacting agents. We will here use a cellular automaton version of this game to study the influence of an extra-linguistic structure over the evolution of the lexicon, but also the influence of language over this a priori structure. This extra-linguistic structure will be coded by first giving a location in a 2-D world to agents, and then by allowing them to move in relation to the outcome of the naming games. The results we will present show strong self-organization phenomena, such as the appearance of language and geographical clusters, in addition to the basic properties of the game (high communication success).