CREATIVE COMPOSITIONALITY FROM REINFORCEMENT LEARNING IN SIGNALING GAMES

Compositional language use shows in creatively associating hitherto unencountered meanings and forms in systematic ways. I submit that compositionality, as a key feature of human language, is no reason not to see a continuum between human speech and animal communication. Basic forms of compositional creativity presuppose surprisingly little cognitive sophistication. If changes in agents’ behavioral dispositions are susceptible to similarities between different meanings and, independently, to similarities between different forms, creative compositionality can emerge in a signaling game model with reinforcement learning.