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Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
n this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…
Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that…
The iterated learning model is an agent model which simulates the transmission of of language from generation to generation. It is used to study how the language adapts to pressures imposed by transmission. In each iteration, a language…
There are both benefits and drawbacks to cultural diversity. It can lead to friction and exacerbate differences. However, as with biological diversity, cultural diversity is valuable in times of upheaval; if a previously effective solution…
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…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Motivated by theories of language and communication that explain why communities with large numbers of speakers have, on average, simpler languages with more regularity, we cast the representation learning problem in terms of learning to…
Contact between languages has the potential to transmit vocabulary and other language features; however, this does not always happen. Here, an iterated learning model is used to examine, in a simple way, the resistance of languages to…
We examine the effects of instantiating Lewis signaling games within a population of speaker and listener agents with the aim of producing a set of general and robust representations of unstructured pixel data. Preliminary experiments…
The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…
Artificial agents have been shown to learn to communicate when needed to complete a cooperative task. Some level of language structure (e.g., compositionality) has been found in the learned communication protocols. This observed structure…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects' shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their…
Multilingualism is incredibly common around the world, leading to many important theoretical and practical questions about how children learn multiple languages at once. For example, does multilingual acquisition lead to delays in learning?…
Three theories offer competing predictions about how people respond to growing diversity in their social environment. Contact theory suggests more exposure to out-groups reduces prejudice; conflict theory predicts a stronger in-group…
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,…
Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…