Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Menzerath-Altmann law is a general law of human language stating, for instance, that the longer a word, the shorter its syllables. With the metaphor that genomes are words and chromosomes are syllables, we examine if genomes also obey the law. We find that longer genomes tend to be made of smaller chromosomes in organisms from three different kingdoms: fungi, plants, and animals. Our findings suggest that genomes self-organize under principles similar to those of human language.

Human language is the key evolutionary innovation that makes humans different from other species. And yet, the fabric of language is tangled and all levels of description (from semantics to syntax) involve multiple layers of complexity. Recent work indicates that the global traits displayed by such levels can be analyzed in terms of networks of connected words. Here, we review the state of the art on language webs and their potential relevance to cognitive science. The emergence of syntax through language acquisition is used as a case study to illustrate how the approach can shed light into relevant questions concerning language organization and its evolution.

We show that the law of brevity, i.e. the tendency of words to shorten as their frequency increases, is also found in dolphin surface behavioral patterns. As far as we know, this is the first evidence of the law in another species, suggesting that coding efficiency is not unique to humans.

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.

Human language may have started from a consistent set of mappings between meanings and signals. These mappings, referred to as the early vocabulary, are considered to be the results of conventions established among the agents of a population. In this study, we report simulation models for investigating how such conventions can be reached. We propose that convention is essentially the product of self-organization of the population through interactions among the agents; and that cultural selection is another mechanism that speeds up the establishment of convention. Whereas earlier studies emphasized either one or the other of these two mechanisms, our focus is to integrate them into one hybrid model. The combination of these two complementary mechanisms, i.e. self-organization and cultural selection, provides a plausible explanation for cultural evolution which progresses with high transmission rate. Furthermore, we observe that as the vocabulary tends to convergence there is a uniform tendency to exhibit a sharp phase transition.