Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Language has a fundamentally social function. Processes of human interaction along with domain-general cognitive processes shape the structure and knowledge of language. Recent research in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that patterns of use strongly affect how language is acquired, is used, and changes. These processes are not independent of one another but are facets of the same complex adaptive system (CAS). Language as a CAS involves the following key features: The system consists of multiple agents (the speakers in the speech community) interacting with one another. The system is adaptive; that is, speakers' behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past interactions together feed forward into future behavior. A speaker's behavior is the consequence of competing factors ranging from perceptual constraints to social motivations. The structures of language emerge from interrelated patterns of experience, social interaction, and cognitive mechanisms. The CAS approach reveals commonalities in many areas of language research, including first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language evolution, and computational modeling.

In recent decades, there has been a surge of interest in the origin of language across a wide range of disciplines. Emergentism provides a new perspective to integrate investigations from different areas of study. This paper discusses how the study of language acquisition can contribute to the inquiry, in particular when computer modeling is adopted as the research methodology. An agent-based model is described as an illustration, which simulates how word order in a language could have emerged at the very beginning of language origin. Two important features of emergence, heterogeneity and nonlinearity, are demonstrated in the model, and their implications for applied linguistics are discussed.

Whether simple syntax (in the form of simple word order) can emerge during the emergence of lexicon is studied from a simulation perspective; a multiagent computational model is adopted to trace a lexicon-syntax coevolution through iterative communications. Several factors that may affect this self-organizing process are discussed. An indirect meaning transference is simulated to study the effect of nonlinguistic information in listener's comprehension. Besides the theoretical and empirical argumentations, this computational model, following the Emergentism, demonstrates an adaptation of syntax from some domain-general abilities, which provides an argumentation against the Innatism.