Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Abstract This chapter outlines the main challenges a theory for the cultural evolution of language should address and proposes a particular theory which is worked out and explored in greater detail in the remaining chapters of this book. The theory rests on two ...

Abstract This chapter shows a concrete example of a language game experiment for studying the cultural evolution of one of the most basic functions of language, namely to draw attention to an object in the context by naming a characteristic feature of the object. If ...

This chapter studies three strategies giving rise to color categories and descriptions for them: a strategy for basic hue terms (“yellow”,“blue”,“green”, etc.), for brightness terms (“shiny”,“dull”, etc.) and for graded membership terms (as in:“very blue” or “slightly blue”). ...MORE ⇓

Abstract This chapter investigates how a vocabulary for talking about body actions can emerge in a population of grounded autonomous agents instantiated as humanoid robots. The agents play a Posture Game in which the speaker asks the hearer to take on a certain ...

This chapter studies how basic spatial categories such as left-right, front-back, far-near or north-south can emerge in a population of robotic agents in coevolution with terms that express these categories. It introduces various language strategies and tests them first in ...

This chapter introduces a language game experiment for studying the formation of a shared lexicon when word meanings are not restricted to a single domain, but instead consist of any combination of perceptual features from many different domains. The main difficulty for the ...

Case has fascinated linguists for centuries without however revealing its most important secrets. This paper offers operational explanations for case through language game experiments in which autonomous agents describe real-world events to each other. The ...

Abstract This chapter explores a semantics-oriented approach to the origins of syntactic structure. It reports on experiments whereby speakers introduce hierarchical constructions and grammatical markers to express which conceptualization strategy hearers are ...

Abstract Grammatical agreement means that two linguistic units share certain syntactic or semantic features such as gender, number or person. Agreement has a variety of grammatical functions. One of them, called internal agreement, is to signal which words ...

Abstract This chapter explores a possible language strategy for verbalizing aspect: the encoding of Aktionsarten by means of morphological markers. The Russian tense-aspect system is used as a model. We first operationalize this system and reconstruct the learning ...

Human natural languages use quantifiers as ways to designate the number of objects of a set. They include numerals, such as “three”, or circumscriptions, such as “a few”. The latter are not only underdetermined but also context dependent. We provide a cultural-evolution ...