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Exploring the effect of power law social popularity on language evolution
Artificial Life
|April 16, 2014
Summary
Social popularity distribution significantly impacts language evolution. An optimal power law (λ ≈ 1.0) facilitates efficient linguistic convention emergence and diffusion, balancing social scaling, understanding, and population growth.
Area of Science:
- Computational Linguistics
- Artificial Life
- Evolutionary Sociology
Background:
- Social popularity distributions influence emergent phenomena.
- Understanding language evolution requires modeling social interactions.
- Power laws are prevalent in large-scale social systems.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the impact of power-law distributed social popularity on language origin and change.
- To identify optimal conditions for linguistic convention evolution.
- To explore the evolutionary trade-offs in language emergence.
Main Methods:
- Utilized three artificial life models to simulate linguistic convention evolution (lexical, categorical, syntactic).
- Conducted cross-model analysis to determine the effects of varying social popularity distributions.
- Analyzed empirical data from language-based social systems.
Main Results:
- An optimal social popularity distribution (power law with λ ≈ 1.0) was identified.
- This optimal scaling enables efficient emergence and diffusion of linguistic conventions.
- Mutual understandability is maintained in large populations under optimal conditions.
Conclusions:
- Optimal social popularity represents a trade-off between social scaling, mutual understandability, and population growth.
- Empirical evidence supports the existence of these optimal power laws in language-centric social systems.
- The study links ubiquitous power laws in social systems to individual behaviors driving language evolution.
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