Modelling Social Structures and Hierarchies in Language Evolution

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different social configurations influence language evolution, finding that isolated groups develop more natural communication systems than interconnected ones, and a dominant interlocutor has limited impact.

Contribution

It introduces models of social structures in language evolution, highlighting the effects of group connectivity and dominance roles on emergent communication.

Findings

Isolated groups foster more natural language-like systems.

Connected groups produce less language-like communication.

A dominant interlocutor does not significantly improve language emergence.

Abstract

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.