Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Darwin saw similarities between the evolution of species and the evolution of languages, and it is now widely accepted that similarities between related languages can often be interpreted in terms of a bifurcating descent history ('phylogenesis'). Such interpretations are supported when the distributions of shared and unshared traits (for example, in terms of etymological roots for elements of basic vocabulary) are analysed using tree-building techniques and found to be well-explained by a phylogenetic model. In this article, we question the demographic assumption which is sometimes made when a tree-building approach has been taken to a set of cultures or languages, namely that the resulting tree is also representative of a bifurcating population history. Using historical census data relating to Gaelic- and English-speaking inhabitants of Sutherland (Highland Scotland), we have explored the dynamics of language death due to language shift, representing the extreme case of lack of congruence between the genetic and the culture-historical processes. Such cases highlight the important role of selective cultural migration (or shifting between branches) in determining the extinction rates of different languages on such trees.

Abstract Axelrod's model for culture dissemination offers a nontrivial answer to the question of why there is cultural diversity given that people's beliefs have a tendency to become more similar to each other's as they interact repeatedly. The answer depends on the two control ...

Structured meaning-signal mappings, i.e., mappings that preserve neighborhood relationships by associating similar signals with similar meanings, are advantageous in an environment where signals are corrupted by noise and sub-optimal meaning inferences are rewarded as well. The evolution of these mappings, however, cannot be explained within a traditional language evolutionary game scenario in which individuals meet randomly because the evolutionary dynamics is trapped in local maxima that do not reflect the structure of the meaning and signal spaces. Here we use a simple game theoretical model to show analytically that when individuals adopting the same communication code meet more frequently than individuals using different codes-a result of the spatial organization of the population-then advantageous linguistic innovations can spread and take over the population. In addition, we report results of simulations in which an individual can communicate only with its K nearest neighbors and show that the probability that the lineage of a mutant that uses a more efficient communication code becomes fixed decreases exponentially with increasing K. These findings support the mother tongue hypothesis that human language evolved as a communication system used among kin, especially between mothers and offspring.