Parent Oriented Teacher Selection Causes Language Diversity
This addresses the problem of understanding language evolution and diversity for researchers in linguistics and evolutionary modeling, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing evolutionary frameworks with specific constraints.
The study tackled the emergence of linguistic diversity by modeling how children learn language from teachers selected within small, parent-oriented groups, leading to the formation of subcommunities with distinct languages and high internal comprehension, with the number of languages following a power law relative to group size.
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are physically close to each other. Clearly these groups are relatively small compared to the entire population. We restrict selection of the teachers from such small groups, called imitation sets, around parents. Then the child learns language from a teacher selected within the imitation set of her parent. As a result, there are subcommunities with their own languages developed. Within subcommunity comprehension is found to be high. The number of languages is related to the relative size of imitation set by a power law.