Related papers: Evolutionary forces in language change

The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…

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,…

(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…

Competition between species and genotypes is a dominant factor in a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Biological dynamics are typically highly stochastic, and therefore, analyzing a competitive system requires accounting for…

We are interested in populations in which the fitness of different genetic types fluctuates in time and space, driven by temporal and spatial fluctuations in the environment. For simplicity, our population is assumed to be composed of just…

Intraspecific trait variation has been increasingly recognized as an important factor in determining species interaction and diversity. Eco-evolutionary models have studied the distribution of trait values within a population that changes…

Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…

The geographical pattern of human dialects is a result of history. Here, we formulate a simple spatial model of language change which shows that the final result of this historical evolution may, to some extent, be predictable. The model…

Biological evolution depends on the passing down to subsequent generations of genetic information encoding beneficial traits, and on the removal of unfit individuals by a selection mechanism. However, selection acts on phenotypes, and is…

Biological functions are generated as a result of developmental dynamics that form phenotypes governed by genotypes. The dynamical system for development is shaped through genetic evolution following natural selection based on the fitness…

We consider a trait-structured population subject to mutation, birth and competition of logistic type, where the number of coexisting types may fluctuate. Applying a limit of rare mutations to this population while keeping the population…

Languages disfavor word forms containing sequences of similar or identical consonants, due to the biomechanical and cognitive difficulties posed by patterns of this sort. However, the specific evolutionary processes responsible for this…

Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we…

Two mathematical models of macroevolution are studied. These models have population dynamics at the species level, and mutations and extinction of species are also included. The population dynamics are updated by difference equations with…

We perform statistical analysis of the phenomenon of neology, the process by which new words emerge in a language, using large diachronic corpora of English. We investigate the importance of two factors, semantic sparsity and frequency…

Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…

Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…

The replicator-mutator dynamic was originally derived to model the evolution of language, and since the model was derived in such a general manner, it has been applied to the dynamics of social behavior and decision making in multi-agent…

Influencing various aspects of human activity, migration is associated also with language formation. To examine the mutual interaction of these processes, we study a Naming Game with migrating agents. The dynamics of the model leads to…

It is known that learning of players who interact in a repeated game can be interpreted as an evolutionary process in a population of ideas. These analogies have so far mostly been established in deterministic models, and memory loss in…