LANGUAGE EMERGENCE IN THE LABORATORY: A METHOD SUITABLE TO DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

The last decade has seen an explosion of studies examining language emergence experimentally (a literature known as Experimental Semiotics). While revealing, most studies in this domain typically have a complex set of constraints on behavior which make formal analysis of the results challenging. Wishing to take a dynamical systems approach in which we could comprehensively analyze the typology of behavioral outcomes, we devised a coordination task based on Roberts and Goldstone (2011)’s number summing game and studied the process by which the groups arrived at a coordinating scheme. While we have not yet seen evidence for traditional hallmarks of natural language in our game, we believe two features of the results offer a helpful perspective on language evolution: (i) the variation across groups is organized around equivalence classes of strategies (egalitarian points) that stem from the combination of the task structure with the physical capabilities of the organisms, suggesting a dynamicalsystems-based framework for understanding parametric variation in natural languages different from conceptions of Universal Grammar as an information structure and (ii) individual behavior appears to be a sum of impulses that generally approximate but also tend to resist the egalitarian points, suggesting that construing linguistic structure as self-organized, rather than as biologically specified principles and parameters may help address language emergence.