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Generating Vowel Systems in a Population of Agents
Bart de Boer
VUB AI Laboratory
Pleinlaan 2
1050 BRUSSEL, BELGIUM
bartb@arti.vub.ac.be

Abstract: In the sound systems of human languages remarkable universals are found. These universals can be ex­ plained by innate mechanisms, or by their function in human speech. This paper presents a functional ex­ planation of certain universals of vowel systems us­ ing Alife­techniques. It is based on language­like interactions between members of a population of individual agents. The agents start out empty, but have a ``drive'' to make (vowel) sounds to each other and to imitate these sounds. Through repeated ``imitation games'' and through modifications of their own sound system, based on the outcome of the imitation games, the agents reach coherence. The sound systems that arise have properties that are similar to those of human vowel systems.
Keywords: language origins, cultural evolution, phonological universals
1. Introduction Alife techniques have been used to aid many fields of sci­ ence, such as biology, ethology and psychology. In this pa­ per alife techniques are applied to the field of linguistics. They are used to provide a functional explanation for a number of properties of the sound systems humans use for communication. The human vocal tract is capable of producing an amazing number of different speech sounds. The UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID, de­ scribed in [14]) recognises 921 different speech sounds--- 652 consonants and 269 vowels---found in 451 languages. Still, the number of speech sounds (phonemes) used by any individual language is quite limited. According to Maddi­ eson [14] the average lies between 20 and 37. The maximum number of phonemes of any language in the UPSID is 141 for the Khoisan language !Xu # , the minimum is 11 for the East­Papuan language Rotokas and the South­American language Múra­Pirahã [7,14]. Also, a number of remarkable universals can be found in the sound ...

@inproceedings{deboer97generatingVowel,
  author={B. de Boer},
  title={Generating vowel systems in a population of agents},
  year={1997},
  address={Cambridge, MA},
  editor={Husbands, P. and Harvey, I.},
  publisher={MIT Press.},
  booktitle={ECAL97},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/deboer97generatingVowel.html}
}

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