Related papers: Language: The missing selection pressure
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
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…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
We use Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory in order to study the evolution of words and the population dynamics of a system comprising two interacting species which initially speak two different languages.…
In a combinatorial communication system, some signals consist of the combinations of other signals. Such systems are more efficient than equivalent, non-combinatorial systems, yet despite this they are rare in nature. Why? Previous…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
Human language is still an embarrassment for evolutionary theory, as the speaker's benefit remains unclear. The willingness to communicate information is shown here to be an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), even if acquiring original…
Emergent communication protocols among humans and artificial neural network agents do not yet share the same properties and show some critical mismatches in results. We describe three important phenomena with respect to the emergence and…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural…
Language carries thought and coordination among humans but rarely reaches further along the spectrum of diverse intelligence. Yet non-neural systems -- from gene regulatory networks and microbial consortia to fungi -- are increasingly…
Finding and facilitating commonalities between the linguistic behaviors of large language models and humans could lead to major breakthroughs in our understanding of the acquisition, processing, and evolution of language. However, most…
Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities…
A number of recent works have proposed techniques for end-to-end learning of communication protocols among cooperative multi-agent populations, and have simultaneously found the emergence of grounded human-interpretable language in the…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Humans' distinctive role in the world can largely be attributed to our capacity for iterated learning, a process by which knowledge is expanded and refined over generations. A range of theories seek to explain why humans are so adept at…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…