Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

It has been suggested that human language emerged as either a new, critical faculty to handle recursion, which linked two other existing systems in the brain, or as an exaptation of an existing mechanism, which had been used for a different purpose to that point. Of these two theories, the latter appears more parsimonious, but, somewhat surprisingly, has attracted less attention among researchers in the field. Navigation is a prime candidate for a task that may benefit from being able to handle recursion, and we give an account of the possible transition from navigation to language. In the described context, it appears plausible that the transition adding the crucial component of human language was promoted by kin selection. We show that once language is present among its speakers, it reinforces the mechanisms of kin selection, boosting such behaviour that benefit one's kin, and any such behaviour in turn boosts the use of language. The article also describes a mechanism through which language is used in lieu of kin markers to promote altruistic behaviour between potentially large communities of unrelated individuals.

This article suggests that the parser underlying human syntax may have originally evolved to assist navigation, a claim supported by computational simulations as well as evidence from neuroscience and psychology. We discuss two independent conjectures about the way in which navigation could have supported the emergence of this aspect of the human language faculty: firstly, by promoting the development of a parser; and secondly, by possibly providing a topic of discussion to which this parser could have been applied with minimum effort. The paper summarizes our previously published experiments and provides original results in support of the evolutionary advantages this type of communication can provide, compared with other foraging strategies. Another aspect studied in the experiments is the combination and range of environmental factors that make communication beneficial, focusing on the availability and volatility of resources. We suggest that the parser evolved for navigation might initially have been limited to handling regular languages, and describe a mechanism that may have created selective pressure for a context-free parser.

This paper presents an approach to simulating the evolution of language in which communication is viewed as an emerging phenomenon with both genetic and social components. A model is presented in which a population of agents is able to evolve a shared grammatical language from a purely lexical one, with critical elements of the faculty of language developed as a result of the need to navigate in and exchange information about the environment.