This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Web of Science (3) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Vogt, P. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

On the Acquisition and Evolution of Compositional Languages: Sparse Input and the Productive Creativity of Children

School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, UK

This paper investigates the productive creativity of children in a computational model of the emergence and evolution of compositional structures in language. In previous models it was shown that compositional structures can emerge in language when the language is transmitted from one generation to the next through a transmission bottleneck. Due to the fact that in these models language is transmitted only in a vertical direction where adults only speak to children and children only listen, this bottleneck needs to be imposed by the experimenter. In the current study, this bottleneck is removed and instead of having a vertical transmission of language, the language is—in most simulations— transmitted horizontally (i.e., any agent can speak to any other agent). It is shown that such a horizontal transmission scenario does not need an externally imposed bottleneck, because the children face an implicit bottleneck when they start speaking early in life. The model is compared with the recent development of Nicaraguan Sign Language, where it is observed that children are a driving force for inventing grammatical (or compositional) structures, possibly due to a sparseness of input (i.e., an implicit bottleneck). The results show that in the studied model children are indeed the creative driving force for the emergence and stable evolution of compositional languages, thus suggesting that this implicit bottleneck may—in part—explain why children are so typically good at acquiring language and, moreover, why they may have been the driving force for the emergence of grammar in language.

Key Words: evolution of language • language acquisition • compositionality • iterated learning • language games

Adaptive Behavior, Vol. 13, No. 4, 325-346 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/105971230501300403


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				S. Swarup and L. Gasser The Iterated Classification Game: A New Model of the Cultural Transmission of Language Adaptive Behavior, June 1, 2009; 17(3): 213 - 235. [Abstract] [PDF]