Related papers: Language simulation after a conquest
An earlier study (Nettle 1999b) concluded, based on computer simulations and some inferences from empirical data, that languages will change the more slowly the larger the population gets. We replicate this study using a more complete…
Following Abrams and Strogatz 2003 and Patriarca and Leppanen 2004, five other physics groups independently started to simulate the competition of languages, as opposed to the evolution of a human language out of ape sounds, or the learning…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
A major target of linguistics and cognitive science has been to understand what class of learning systems can acquire the key structures of natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue…
Crosslingual transfer is crucial to contemporary language models' multilingual capabilities, but how it occurs is not well understood. We ask what happens to a monolingual language model when it begins to be trained on a second language.…
The understanding of language competition helps us to predict extinction and survival of languages spoken by minorities. A simple agent-based model of a sexual population, based on the Penna model, is built in order to find out under which…
There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three…
The bit-string model of Schulze and Stauffer (2005) is applied to non-equilibrium situations and then gives better agreement with the empirical distribution of language sizes. Here the size is the number of people having this language as…
A language dynamics model on a square lattice, which is an extension of the one popularized by Abrams and Strogatz [1], is analyzed using ODE bifurcation theory. For this model we are interested in the existence and spectral stability of…
Rapid progress in machine learning for natural language processing has the potential to transform debates about how humans learn language. However, the learning environments and biases of current artificial learners and humans diverge in…
We consider a model of language development, known as the naming game, in which agents invent, share and then select descriptive words for a single object, in such a way as to promote local consensus. When formulated on a finite and…
Pretraining language models on formal language can improve their acquisition of natural language. Which features of the formal language impart an inductive bias that leads to effective transfer? Drawing on insights from linguistics and…
This work attempts to give new theoretical insights to the absence of intermediate stages in the evolution of language. In particular, it is developed an automata networks approach to a crucial question: how a population of language users…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
Here we describe how some important scaling laws observed in the distribution of languages on Earth can emerge from a simple computer simulation. The proposed language dynamics includes processes of selective geographic colonization,…
A simple spatial computer simulation model was recently introduced to study the evolution of the linguistic diversity. The model considers processes of selective geographic colonization, linguistic anomalous diffusion and mutation. In the…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a…
We study a supremacy distribution in evolving Barabasi-Albert networks. The supremacy $s_i$ of a node $i$ is defined as a total number of all nodes that are younger than $i$ and can be connected to it by a directed path. For a network with…