Naming Game on Adaptive Weighted Networks

TL;DR

This paper studies a naming game on adaptive weighted networks where communication success influences interaction probabilities, revealing conditions for rapid consensus or persistent multilingual regimes, with implications for understanding language emergence.

Contribution

It introduces a model where connection weights adapt based on communication success, exploring how this affects language dynamics and consensus formation.

Findings

Quick convergence to a single language in some parameter regimes.

Multi-language coexistence with dominant language emergence in others.

Comparison of model outcomes with human language distribution.

Abstract

We examine a naming game on an adaptive weighted network. A weight of connection for a given pair of agents depends on their communication success rate and determines the probability with which the agents communicate. In some cases, depending on the parameters of the model, the preference toward successfully communicating agents is basically negligible and the model behaves similarly to the naming game on a complete graph. In particular, it quickly reaches a single-language state, albeit some details of the dynamics are different from the complete-graph version. In some other cases, the preference toward successfully communicating agents becomes much more relevant and the model gets trapped in a multi-language regime. In this case gradual coarsening and extinction of languages lead to the emergence of a dominant language, albeit with some other languages still being present. A comparison of distribution of languages in our model and in the human population is discussed.