Journal
ADVANCES IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS
Volume 6, Issue 4, Pages 537-558Publisher
WORLD SCIENTIFIC PUBL CO PTE LTD
DOI: 10.1142/S0219525903001055
Keywords
language; cultural evolution; compositionality
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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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