Experiments in cultural language evolution

Human natural languages use quantifiers as ways to designate the number of objects of a set. They include numerals, such as ``three'', or circumscriptions, such as ``a few''. The latter are not only underdetermined but also context dependent. We provide a cultural-evolution expla...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Advances in interaction studies
Contributors: Steels, Luc 1952- (Editor)
Format: Electronic Book
Language:English
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Published: Amsterdam [u.a.] Benjamins 2012
In: Advances in interaction studies (3)
Series/Journal:Advances in interaction studies 3
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Language origins / Language development / Grammaticalization
Further subjects:B Collection of essays
B Linguistic paleontology
B Anthropological linguistics
B Mathematical statistics
B Language and languages ; Origin
B Language and languages Origin Electronic books
B Electronic books
B Statistics
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Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
Description
Summary:Human natural languages use quantifiers as ways to designate the number of objects of a set. They include numerals, such as ``three'', or circumscriptions, such as ``a few''. The latter are not only underdetermined but also context dependent. We provide a cultural-evolution explanation for the emergence ofsuch quantifiers, focusing in particular on the role of environmental constraints on strategy choices. Through a series of situated interaction experiments, we show how acommunity of robotic agents can self-organize a quantification system. Different perceptions of the scene make underdetermined quantifiers useful and environments in which the distribution of objects exhibits some degree of predictability createsfavorable conditions for context-dependent quantifiers.
Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of contents -- Foreword -- References -- Self-organization and selection in cultural language evolution -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Facts about cultural language evolution -- 2.1. Language systems and language strategies -- 2.2. Language change and language evolution -- 2.3. Semiotic dynamics -- 2.4. Challenges for theories of cultural language evolution -- 3. Language evolution through linguistic selection -- 3.1. Linguistic selection criteria -- 3.2. Linguistic selection of systems and strategies -- 4. The role of cognition -- 5. The role of self-organization -- 6. Evolutionary language games -- 6.1. Paradigms for studying cultural language evolution -- 6.2. Language games -- 6.3. Empirical relevance of language game experiments -- 7. Conclusions -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Part I: Emergence of perceptually grounded vocabularies -- The Grounded Naming Game -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Non-Grounded Naming Game -- 2.1. Diagnostics and repairs for the Non-Grounded Naming Game -- 2.2. Alignment for the Non-Grounded Naming Game -- 3. The Grounded Naming Game -- 3.1. Perception and conceptualization -- 3.2. Experimental results -- 3.3. Adding additional heuristics -- 4. Conclusions -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Language strategies for color -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The Color Naming Game -- 3. Language strategies for color -- 3.1. Hue strategy -- 3.2. Brightness Strategy -- 3.3. Graded Membership Strategy -- 4. Linguistic selection of strategies -- 4.1. Selective advantages -- 4.2. Strategy competition -- 5. Conclusion -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Appendix -- A. Interpretation variance -- B. Strategy coherence -- Emergent mirror systems for body language -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The mirror experiment.
ISBN:902720456X