THE EMERGENCE OF A LEXICON BY PROTOTYPE-CATE GO RISING AGENTS IN A STRUCTURED INFINITE WORLD

摘要

Over the last decade, computational models and simulations have been used to explore whetherwords could have emerged in the earliest stages of language evolution through a process ofself-organisation in a population. In this paper, a new model of this family is presented, withtwo major differences from previous models. First, the world consists of an infinite numberof objects, while remaining easily manipulable. Second, the agents' categories are based onprototypes, and their structure reflects the environments in which they are acquired and used.Simulation results reveal that, as in previous models, coherent lexicons still generally emerge,but they are sensitive to certain model conditions, including the world structure.