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Zuidema, W. and Westermann, G. (2001) On the Relevance of Language Evolution Models for Cognitive Science. Technical report, AI-Lab, VUB Brussels.
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Paper at a Glance 

On the Relevance of Language Evolution Models for Cognitive Science 
Willem H. Zuidema
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels
Belgium
Gert Westermann
Sony CSL­Paris
6, rue Amyot, 75005 Paris
France
Abstract We argue that Cognitive Science can profit from the study of language evolution. Research in language evolution is concerned with the question of how complex linguis­ tic structures can emerge from the interactions between many communicating individuals. As such it comple­ ments psycholinguistics which investigates the processes involved in individual adult language processing, and child language development studies, investigating how children learn a given language. We focus on the frame­ work of language games and argue that they offer a fresh and formal perspective on many current debates in Cognitive Science, including those on the synchronic vs. diachronic perspective on language, the embodiment and situatedness of language and cognition, and the self­ organization of linguistic patterns. We present a model of lexical dynamics that shows the spontaneous emergence of near­optimal characteristics of a lexicon in a distributed population of individuals. Finally, we analyze the short­ comings of our models and discuss how research in Cog­ nitive Science could contribute to improving them.
Introduction Cognitive Science has a long tradition of formal and computational models of language processing and lan­ guage learning. These models generally do not con­ sider multiple individuals in interaction; they are there­ fore restricted to studying language synchronically. Re­ cent years, on the other hand, have seen a growing inter­ est in language games: models of language change and language evolution in populations of communicating in­ dividuals. We argue that, although these models have not been very wide­spread in the cognitive science commu­ nity, they can in fact be considered an integral part of this field. ...
BibTex
@techreport{zuidema01onThe,
  author={W. Zuidema and Gert Westermann},
  title={On the Relevance of Language Evolution Models for Cognitive Science},
  year={2001},
  institution={AI-Lab, VUB Brussels},
  note={AI-MEMO 01-03},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/zuidema01onThe.html}
}

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