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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.

Keywords: Language; cultural evolution; compositionality

@article{smith03complexSystem,
  author={K. Smith and H. Brighton and S. Kirby},
  title={Complex Systems in Language Evolution: the cultural emergence of compositional structure},
  journal={Advances in Complex Systems},
  year={2003},
  month={12},
  volume={6},
  number={4},
  pages={537-558},
  doi={10.1142/S0219525903001055},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/smith03complexSystem.html},
  keywords={Language; cultural evolution; compositionality}
}

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