Related papers: Utterance Selection Model of Language Change
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…
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…
In this paper, we derive new continuous time limits of the Utterance Selection Model (USM) for language change (Baxter et al., Phys. Rev. E {\bf 73}, 046118, 2006). This is motivated by the fact that the Fokker-Planck continuous time limit…
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…
People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
In spoken languages, speakers divide up the space of phonetic possibilities into different regions, corresponding to different phonemes. We consider a simple exemplar model of how this division of phonetic space varies over time among a…
We propose a model for the evolutionary ecology of words as one attempt to extend evolutionary game theory and agent-based models by utilizing the rich linguistic expressions of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our model enables the emergence…
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…
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.…
The time variation of the rank $k$ of words for six Indo-European languages is obtained using data from Google Books. For low ranks the distinct languages behave differently, maybe due to syntaxis rules, whereas for $k>50$ the law of large…
In large but finite populations, weak demographic stochasticity due to random birth and death events can lead to population extinction. The process is analogous to the escaping problem of trapped particles under random forces. Methods…
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,…
We study the rate of convergence to equilibrium of the solution of a Fokker--Planck type equation introduced by one of the authors in 2006 to describe opinion formation in a multi-agent system. The main feature of this Fokker--Planck…
Stochastic reaction-diffusion equations are a popular modelling approach for studying interacting populations in a heterogeneous environment under the influence of environmental fluctuations. Although the theoretical basis of alternative…
Short-term phonetic accommodation is a fundamental driver behind accent change, but how does real-time input from another speaker's voice shape the speech planning representations of an interlocutor? We advance a computational model of…
We propose a stochastic model to study phonetic changes as an evolutionary process driven by social interactions between two groups of individuals with different phonological systems. Particularly, we focus on the changes in the place of…
Computational modelling with multi-agent systems is becoming an important technique of studying language evolution. We present a brief introduction into this rapidly developing field, as well as our own contributions that include an…
We establish an analogy between the Fokker-Planck equation describing evolutionary landscape dynamics and the Schr\"{o}dinger equation which characterizes quantum mechanical particles, showing how a population with multiple genetic traits…
We consider a nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation derived from a Cucker-Smale model for flocking with noise. There is a known phase transition depending on the noise between a regime with a unique stationary solution which is isotropic…
We present an explicit unified stochastic model of fluctuations in population size due to random birth, death, density-dependent competition and environmental fluctuations. Stochastic dynamics provide insight into small populations,…