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Paper at a Glance

The cultural evolution of syntactic constraints in phonology.
Luc Steels(1,2) and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (1)
(1) Sony Computer Science Laboratory - Paris
(2) VUB Articial Intelligence Laboratory - Brussels
steels@arti.vub.ac.be

Abstract The paper reports on an experiment in which a group of autonomous agents self-organises through cultural evolution constraints on the combination of the indi- vidual sounds (phonemes) in their repertoires. We use a selectionist approach whereby a repertoire evolves by mutations of patterns, constrained by functional pres- sures from perception and production and the need to conform to the group.
Introduction Language was commonly viewed in the 19th century, including by Charles Darwin, as a living system which evolves in a cultural fashion. This changed with the structuralist movement in linguistics that dominated research in the 20th century. Structuralism empha- sises the formal description of language as an idealised system at a specic moment in time, which is largely innate. This approach has therefore not produced sig- nicant explanatory formal models on how language has emerged or how it evolves. Principles and mod- eling techniques from articial life research can make a major contribution, although they need to be ap- plied to cultural rather than genetic evolution. This paper reports on a case study in the cultural evolution of a particular nontrivial aspect of language, namely phonology. The sound system of a natural language like English is constrained in two ways: The repertoire of individual sounds (phonemes) that speakers of a particular lan- guage are able to produce, recognise, and reproduce are a subset of all the possible sounds that the human vo- cal apparatus can in principle produce (Ladefoged and Maddieson,1996). For example, English does not use the vowel [y] (pronounced as in French "rue") whereas French does. Second, a language constrains the set of possible sound combinations. For example in English [mb] ...

@inproceedings{steels00theCultural,
  author={L. Steels and P-Y. Oudeyer},
  title={The cultural evolution of syntactic constraints in phonology},
  year={2000},
  publisher={MIT Press},
  booktitle={Artificial Life VII},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/steels00theCultural.html},
  keywords={evolutionary linguistics, phonology, syntactic constraints, agents, agents, embodiment}
}

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