Modeling the Emergence of a New Language: Naming Game with Hybridization

Abstract

In recent times, the research field of language dynamics has focused on the investigation of language evolution, dividing the work in three evolutive steps, according to the level of complexity: lexicon, categories and grammar. The Naming Game is a simple model capable of accounting for the emergence of a lexicon, intended as the set of words through which objects are named. We introduce a stochastic modification of the Naming Game model with the aim of characterizing the emergence of a new language as the result of the interaction of agents. We fix the initial phase by splitting the population in two sets speaking either language A or B. Whenever the result of the interaction of two individuals results in an agent able to speak both A and B, we introduce a finite probability that this state turns into a new idiom C, so to mimic a sort of hybridization process. We study the system in the space of parameters defining the interaction, and show that the proposed model displays a rich variety of behaviours, despite the simple mean field topology of interactions. Emergence of a lexicon as a languageThe modeling activity of language dynamics aims at describing language evolution as the global effect of the local interactions between individuals in a population of N agents, who tend to align their verbal behavior locally, by a negotiation process through which a successful communication is achieved [1,2]. In this framework, the emergence of a particular communication system is not due to an external coordination, or a common psychological background, but it simply occurs as a convergence effect in the dynamical processes that start from an initial condition with no existing words (agents having to invent them), or with no agreement.Our work is based on the Naming Game (NG) model, and on its assumptions [3]. In Fig. 1 we recall the NG basic pairwise interaction scheme. A fundamental assumption of NG is that vocabulary evolution associated to every * The final publication will be available at http://www.springer.com/lncs SUCCESSFigure 1: Naming Game interaction scheme. A speaker and a hearer are picked up randomly. The speaker utters a word chosen randomly in his vocabulary. Failure: the hearer does not know the uttered word and he simply adds it to his vocabulary. Success: the hearer knows the uttered word and both agents by agreement delete all the words in their vocabularies except the uttered word one. single object is considered independent. This lets us simplify the evolution of the whole lexicon as the evolution of the set of words associated to a single object, equally perceived in the sensorial sphere by all agents.The simplicity of NG in describing the emergence of a lexicon also relies on the fact that competing words in an individual vocabulary are not weighted, so that they can be easily stored or deleted [4]. In fact it turns out that for convergence to a single word consensus state, the weights are not necessary as it was supposed by the seminal work in this research field [3]. Every agent is a bo...

Modeling the Emergence of Contact Languages

“…We stress that our aim here is not that of entering in the details of the creole formation at a fine-grained linguistic level, rather that of uncovering some of the general mechanisms that determine the emergence of contact languages, and that successfully apply to the case of creole formation. In particular, we here refer to a variant [ 25 ] of the NG [ 20 ] in which bilingual individuals, i.e., individuals familiar with two different languages, may end up developing a third language. It is important to remark that here we make a specific hypothesis that deviates from the original Naming Game model: the model we consider is not a reference game, since there are no objects to be named.…”

What is India speaking? Exploring the “Hinglish” invasion

“…In evolutionary biology a mutation is defined as any alteration in a gene from its natural state, wherein fitness is defined as the ability of a species to survive and reproduce [56]. Exemplarbased theories of cognition and language change [1,57,58] offer a means of understanding the emergence of mutations (innovations) within language shift and have been incorporated within recent language dynamics modeling of two-class competition [59,60,61]. Hybrid languages, while never incorporated into population-based shift models, are suggested to have fitness distinct from traditional languages [20].…”