Factors Influencing the Emergence of Dependency Length Minimization in Neural Agent Simulations

Given various grammatical options, language users prefer the word order choice that reduces the overall length of syntactic dependencies, a principle known as dependency length minimization (DLM). The origins of this preference remain an open question, particularly whether it originates from constraints on efficient information processing. Computational simulations provide a powerful approach to identifying the factors influencing the emergence of linguistic phenomena. However, previous simulations of DLM have not examined realistic interaction contexts and have produced mixed results. The present study investigates the emergence of DLM in artificial languages using a recently proposed language learning and communication framework based on recurrent neural networks. In this framework, agents are trained to speak and interpret artificial languages and then use these languages to communicate. Using this framework, we study the impact of several factors related to processing limitations in a communicative setting, such as noise during listening, limited speaker capacity, and incremental sentence processing. Our results reveal a complex interplay among these factors in shaping word order preferences in neural agents. Specifically, in the full meaning space, agents regularize toward a single dominant word order, while in the half meaning space, they show a short-before-long preference that only aligns with DLM in verb-initial languages. A consistent DLM preference emerges only when agents are subject to incremental processing pressure. These results suggest that limitations in human cognitive processing may indeed play a role in shaping DLM. Our findings provide insights into the conditions under which neural models replicate human-like preferences for minimizing syntactic dependency distances and highlight the challenges of designing emergent communication models that capture human cognitive biases in language processing.