Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Self-organization and Selection in the Emergence of Vocabulary 

Self-organization and Selection in the Emergence of Vocabulary
"Abstract
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."

From the Conclusion:
"Our approach of studying the emergence of patterns from the interactions among the agents falls into the general setting of agent-based modeling, which has been widely used in the study of various complex systems with emergent properties. There are only a small number of rules describing each agent’s behavior. However, the order emerges from the locally coupled interactions [28].

The reported imitation and interaction models show that interaction between agents in a population can cause them to arrive at a coherent vocabulary. We speculate that, especially in the early stages of language emergence when there was no established communication system, synchronic interactions among agents were possibly the only way for early humans to form conventions and to attain mutual understanding. The imitation and interaction models have allowed us to study how the convention may be achieved under various conditions. The simulations demonstrate that without external design or driving force, coherence among the entire population can be reached only through self-organization by each agent. Each agent concentrates on adjusting him/herself to be better understood by others and to better understand others for his/her own benefit. Nevertheless, this individual focus can lead to global consistency.

The interaction hypothesis, however, only works with small populations and small vocabulary size. We speculate that cultural selection plays a role in speeding up and passing on the progress of interaction between agents through generations. Those vocabularies which have a higher fitness through self-organization will have a higher probability to be transmitted to the next generation. Such an external selection mechanism accumulates the benefits obtained by each agent and spreads them through the population, and therefore speeds up the emergence of a consistent communication system."

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