Parent oriented teacher selection causes language diversity

JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY

卷:429

Article

Cimentepe, Ibrahim¹  Bingol, Haluk O.¹ 

[1] Bogazici Univ, Dept Comp Engn, TR-34342 Istanbul, Turkey

关键词: Language diversity;    Evolution of language;    Language learning model;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.jtbi.2017.06.032

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are physically close to each other. Clearly these groups are relatively small compared to the entire population. We restrict selection of the teachers from such small groups, called imitation sets, around parents. Then the child learns language from a teacher selected within the imitation set of her parent. As a result, there are subcommunities with their own languages developed. Within subcommunity comprehension is found to be high. The number of languages is related to the relative size of imitation set by a power law. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

Free