Modelling Social Structures and Hierarchies in Language Evolution
This addresses the problem of understanding social influences on language evolution for researchers in linguistics and AI, but it is incremental as it builds on prior models.
The study investigated how social structures affect language evolution, finding that isolated agent groups lead to more natural language-like communication systems than interconnected groups, with a dominant interlocutor providing no benefit.
Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that having isolated agent groups rather than an interconnected agent is more advantageous for the emergence of a social communication system. Distinctive groups that are closely connected by communication yield systems less like natural language than fully isolated groups inhabiting the same world. Furthermore, the addition of a dominant male who is asymmetrically favoured as a hearer, and equally likely to be a speaker has no positive influence on the disjoint groups.