An agent-based model of the emergence and evolution of a language system for boolean coordination

Abstract

This paper presents an agent-based model for studying the emergence and evolution of a language system for Boolean coordination. The model has been implemented and tested by conducting a series of experiments that show that a language system for Boolean coordination emerges as a result of a process of self-organisation of the agents’ linguistic interactions when these agents adapt their preferences for vocabulary, syntactic categories and word order to those they observe are used more often by other agents, and that such a language system is reliably transmitted across generations.Peer Reviewe