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Abstract

Compositionality is one of the fundamental properties of natural language. Explaining its evolution remains a challenging problem because most existing explanations require a structured language to be already present in the population before compositionality can successfully spread in a population. In this paper, I study whether a communication system can evolve that shows the preservation of topology between meaning-space and signal-space, without assuming that individuals have any prior processing mechanism for compositionality. I present a formalism to describe a communication system where there is noise in signaling and variation in the values of meanings. In contrast to previous models, both the noise and values depend on the topology of the signal- and meaning spaces. I study a model of a population of agents that each try to optimize their communicative success under these circumstances. The results show that the preservation of topology between follows naturally from the assumptions on noise, values and individual-based optimization.

@inproceedings{zuidema03ecal,
  author={Willem Zuidema},
  title={Optimal communication in a noisy and heterogeneous environment},
  year={2003},
  pages={553-563},
  booktitle={ECAL03},
  url={http://groups.lis.illinois.edu/amag/langev/paper/zuidema03ecal.html}
}