The emergence of language: How to simulate it

Abstract

The emergence of language in populations of primates that initially lacked language can be simulated with artificial organisms controlled by neural networks and living, evolving, and learning in artificial environments. Some simulations have already been done but most of the necessary work is a task for the future. We discuss language evolution under two topics: language is learned from others on the basis of genetically inherited predispositions, and language has important influences on human cognition. We propose an evolutionary sequence according to which bipedalism and the emergence of the hands represent a selective pressure for developing an ability to predict the consequences of one's actions, this ability is the basis for learning by imitating other individuals, and learning by imitating other individuals is applied to learning to imitate their communicative behaviour. © 2007 Springer-Verlag London.