Complex systems in language evolution: the cultural emergence of compositional structures

Smith, Kenny, Brighton, Henry and Kirby, Simon (2003) Complex systems in language evolution: the cultural emergence of compositional structures. Advances in Complex Systems, 6 (4). pp. 537-558. ISSN 0219-5259

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Abstract

Language arises from the interaction of three complex adaptive systems — biological evolution, learning, and culture. We focus here on cultural evolution, and present an Iterated Learning Model of the emergence of compositionality, a fundamental structural property of language. Our main result is to show that the poverty of the stimulus available to language learners leads to a pressure for linguistic structure. When there is a bottleneck on cultural transmission, only a language which is generalizable from sparse input data is stable. Language itself evolves on a cultural time-scale, and compositionality is language's adaptation to stimulus poverty.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	First author and corresponding author
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Ethnology, Language acquisition
Subjects:	Q100 Linguistics
Department:	Faculties > Health and Life Sciences > Psychology
Depositing User:	EPrint Services
Date Deposited:	17 Dec 2008 11:48
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 16:27
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/1451

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