Advanced Review

Models of language evolution

and change
Andrew D.M. Smith∗

In the absence of direct evidence of the emergence of language, the explicitness

of formal models which allow the exploration of interactions between multiple
complex adaptive systems has proven to be an important tool. Computational
simulations have been at the heart of the field of evolutionary linguistics for the
past two decades, particularly through the language game and iterated learning
paradigms, but these are now being extended and complemented in a number of
directions, through formal mathematical models, language-ready robotic agents,
and experimental simulations in the laboratory. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How to cite this article:

WIREs Cogn Sci 2014. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1285

LANGUAGE to support particular hypotheses.1 Until the latter

decades of the 20th century, indeed, this meant that
L anguage is often described as the defining
characteristic of humanity: it is certainly the
central foundation of human society, which has
theorizing about the evolution of language was largely
restricted to intuition and extravagant speculation,
yielding only fanciful and effectively unfalsifiable
enabled our unprecedented accomplishments, provid-
theories (see Refs 2, 3 for overviews). To counter this
ing us with an infinitely expressive means of repre-
problem, evolutionary linguists have tried to garner
senting and successfully communicating to others a
research evidence from a wide variety of disciplines,
limitless number of dynamic situations and complex
from archeology and anthropology to genetics and
thoughts. The primary aim of evolutionary linguistics
primatology, the results of which can be seen in
is to explain how this system could have evolved in
many recent collections devoted to the evolution of
humans, how our species made the transition to a
language.4–18
linguistic communication system of the sort we all use
The key characteristics of language, which
today.
distinguish it from less extensive and less powerful
Language exists in two distinct forms, namely
animal communication systems, are often described in
the ephemeral external linguistic behaviors from
terms of the design features of language itemized by
which utterances are assembled (whether in speech or
Hockett.19 Crucial among these are the observations
sign language), and the internal linguistic representa-
that language can be distinguished from animal
tions stored in patterns of neural connections inside
communication in its being a semantic, productive,
individual human brains. Unfortunately, however,
and culturally learnt system: (1) its units are
neither form is durable: no fossil records of sounds
relatively fixed conventional associations between
or brain patterns exist, and written records are very
forms (utterances) and meanings; (2) new utterances
recent indeed, so there is no possibility of directly
can be created and understood by language users with
observing the genesis of language. The consequent
ease; (3) it is learnt through exposure to the linguistic
lack of direct evidence poses a severe methodological
behavior of other language users. These features are
problem for evolutionary linguistics, as there is little
underpinned by four key subsidiary characteristics20 :
agreement on the kind of evidence which can be used
∗
Correspondence to: andrew.smith@stir.ac.uk • the symbolic, arbitrary nature of the associations
Division of Literature and Languages, University of Stirling, Stirling, between form and meaning21 ;
Scotland, UK • the duality of patterning or double articulation
Conflict of interest: The author has declared no conflicts of interest whereby utterances are constructed from small,
for this article.
meaningful units (morphemes) according to

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

 Advanced Review
morphosyntactic rules, while these morphemes
are themselves made up of individual meaningless
sounds (phonemes), assembled according to a
different set of phonological rules22 ;
• recursion, whereby a form can contain embed-
ded components of the same category as itself,23
famously proposed as the core known com-
ponent of humans’ innate language-specific
faculty24 ;
• compositonality, which allows the meaning of a
complex signal to be derived from its structure
and the meanings of its component parts,25
and which is found at many levels of linguistic
analysis from morphological paradigms to
complex syntactic constructions. Even in animal
communication systems where hierarchical
syntactic structure has been convincingly
established, such as the songs of the Bengalese
finch26 or the humpback whale,27 there is as yet
no justification for assuming the existence of the
corresponding complex semantic structures on
which compositionality is predicated.
Formal modeling has been at the forefront of
illuminating the evolutionary history of language; this
paper provides an overview of some of its major
contributions over the past two decades or so. I
first discuss the nature of formal models in Formal
Models. In Levels of Evolutionary Explanation, I
investigate different levels on which evolutionary
explanations are sought, looking at the differences
between genetic and cultural evolution and between
language evolution and language change. In Types
of Model, I describe various types of models which
have been utilized, starting with computational
simulations and then moving onto models grounded
on robots, mathematical models, and experimental
‘human simulations’.
FORMAL MODELS
A formal model makes deliberate theoretical assump-
tions, rigorously specifies these assumptions, and then
demonstrates their consequences. The great strength
of formal modeling is its meticulous and unambiguous
description of the components of a system and how
they interact, such that ‘predictions about the behav-
ior of that system can be more or less mechanically
produced from the description’ (Ref 28, p. 582). The
explicitness of models allows us to see exactly how
theoretical assumptions have been implemented and
can thus prove whether particular mechanisms do
yield desired effects, or, conversely, whether a result
can be obtained through different mechanisms. The
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
wires.wiley.com/cogsci
underlying theories can thus be evaluated and later
revised on the basis of the evidence provided by the
model. From a practical point of view, formal models
have opened up massive parameter spaces for sys-
tematic exploration and new hypothesis generation,
particularly in areas such as language evolution, which
can profitably be characterized using complex adap-
tive systems,29,30 where the large-scale behavior of a
system emerges from multiple small-scale interactions
among its components, and where our intuitions about
these complex interactions are notoriously fallible.
Models necessarily abstract away from some
details of the system, so there is always a potential
danger that vital components might be omitted, but
the robustness of modeling is that the omissions can
be explicitly specified and their consequences demon-
strated. There is, however, a clear tension in modeling
between making simple models which focus on few but
potentially crucial aspects of the theory while abstract-
ing away from everything else, and more complex
models which try to represent more aspects of the real-
world situation which is being modeled. The decision
between making a simpler or more complex model
is something of a balance between making a model
more realistic and making it more easily analyzable,
ensuring that it is not too simple to ignore key features
of the problem, yet not so complicated that important
results are obscured. Simple models are frequently crit-
icized for being trivial (although such criticism is often
made with the benefit of hindsight), but more com-
plex models require much more reflection and nuanced
interpretation to understand, and therefore lend them-
selves less easily to clear and insightful conclusions.28
Modelers therefore need to be flexible, yet careful to
ensure that their design and implementation decisions
are plausible, justifiable and systematically explained.
LEVELS OF EVOLUTIONARY
EXPLANATION
Biological Evolution
From the historically dominant nativist viewpoint,31
language has traditionally been seen as a biologically-
determined, autonomous module in the human brain
(variously dubbed the language ‘organ’ or ‘instinct’)
which strongly determines the arbitrary universal
structures hypothesized to underpin all languages
(‘Universal Grammar’); differences between individual
languages are considered relatively superficial under
this account. The prime motivation for nativism is the
famous argument from the ‘poverty of the stimulus’,
which claims that children have insufficient linguistic
evidence to acquire the grammar of their language32
(although see Ref 33 for a detailed investigation which
 WIREs Cognitive Science
found no convincing empirical support for the nativist
position). In a very influential paper which effectively
served to reignite interest in the field of language
evolution, Pinker & Bloom provided a theoretical
evolutionary account of the nativist view, pointing out
that as linguistic structures are complex and adaptive,
so the organ which determines them must have evolved
biologically through natural selection for language
learning: ‘Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for
when a trait should be attributed to natural selection:
complex design for some function, and the absence
of alternative processes capable of explaining such
complexity’ (Ref 34, p. 707). Early models therefore
explored the conditions under which language-like
bidirectional communication systems could evolve in
a population, using both computational simulations35
and mathematical models.36,37
The evolutionary mechanism to which Pinker &
Bloom appeal is known as the Baldwin effect, which
claims that a trait which was originally acquired
through learning becomes encoded in the genes,
because learning itself can change the selective envi-
ronment to make genes for the originally learnt behav-
ior more advantageous.38–40 The Baldwin effect has
been demonstrated in models where there is a direct
relationship between genotype and phenotype,41 but
it is suppressed if the genotype–phenotype relation-
ship is made more biologically plausible by including
one-to-many relationships between genotype and
phenotype such as epistasis and pleiotropy in the
model.42 Interestingly, the Baldwin effect itself can
result in a weakening of the selective effect of the
original trait43 : once a genetic predisposition for
language learning has spread through a population, a
process of niche construction44 produces a linguistic
environment with very little variation, which in
turn can relax the selective pressure to maintain the
original predisposition for language learning.
A major stumbling block to accounts of the
genetic assimilation of arbitrary linguistic properties,
however, is the dynamic and prodigious variation in all
language.45,46 Although general principles supporting
language learning can indeed be assimilated while the
language is changing, specific linguistic parameters can
only become canalized if the language being learnt is
fixed.47 Even under conditions of very slow linguistic
change, biological selection works against those genes
biased toward a particular linguistic principle and in
favor of neutral genes,48,49 effectively because if the
evolutionary target is changing too quickly, biological
evolution cannot keep up.
Such arguments against its formulation in terms
of principles and parameters have led over recent
years to increasing scrutiny of the very concept of
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Language evolution and change
Universal Grammar, resulting in very divergent and
often contradictory interpretations of the biological
basis of language (see Ref 2 for a useful summary).
Cultural Evolution
An influential school of thought proposes that, rather
than our brains having evolved to learn languages,
instead the languages themselves have evolved to being
able to be learnt by human brains.39 Languages adapt
to general, nonlinguistic cognitive constraints which
improve their learnability, such as sequential process-
ing or the inference of meaning. Repeated adaptation
to these constraints is reflected in the persistence of
languages with reliable cues to learnability50 and,
more generally, in the universal tendencies we see in
human language.51 Languages need to be learnable
because they exist as cultural artifacts among popula-
tions of people, and a language can persist over time
only if it can be replicated in this cultural environment.
The continual oscillation of language between its
internal representations and external behaviors52 has
profound implications for the characteristics of the
languages which emerge through cultural evolution:
1. Language learners do not have access to
the entire language they are learning, and
so must create their internal representations
based on partial linguistic behavior. This
transmission bottleneck introduces a pressure
for generalization beyond the data,53 which
results in the cultural evolution of structure
from an initially random language. Models of
this process, discussed in more detail in Iterated
Learning, have been convincingly used to claim
that linguistic structure actually exists because
of the poverty of the data available to language
learners, not in spite of it.54
2. Language learners do not have access to
the precise meanings of the utterances they
encounter, but rather they infer meaning based
on the recognition of the common ground they
share with the speaker.55–57 This inference of
meaning is an inherently uncertain and vari-
able process,58 so individual language users
inevitably develop different internal represen-
tations of language.59 Constant communicative
pressure, however, requires the different internal
representations to yield external behavior whose
meanings are reconstructible from context.60
In both cases, the cultural processes of language
acquisition and usage introduce selective pressures
on language which lead to its cultural evolution:
 Advanced Review
linguistic structures which are easy to acquire, or
are communicatively effective, will tend to persist and
increase in the language; those which are difficult to
learn or hinder communication will tend to be dis-
preferred and disappear from the language.46 Natural
selection is therefore not the only explanatory can-
didate for the evolution of linguistic structure, rather
cultural transmission itself instigates linguistic adapta-
tion. This discovery shifts the burden of evolutionary
explanation considerably: evolutionary linguists can
seek to identify the minimal fundamental set of cogni-
tive capacities needed to allow cultural conventions to
be shared in a community, and to document how the
processes of cultural evolution can allow language to
evolve from these underlying mechanisms.20 Impor-
tantly, the relevant cognitive capacities, such as the
assumption of common ground between interlocutors,
and the memorization of experience,56,61 need not
even be dedicated to language alone, but could plau-
sibly have evolved for a different purpose altogether.
Complex Adaptive Systems
For a full understanding of language evolution,
therefore, biological and cultural evolution need to
be considered separately, but also in their mutual
interaction: biological evolution provides cognitive
pre-adaptations including those which impact on how
individuals can interact with each other, but these
social interactions themselves can cause the emergence
of qualitative structural changes in linguistic systems.
A useful conceptualization of language, which allows
the exploration of the role of cumulative cultural
evolution in explaining its crucial characteristics is
as a complex adaptive system.62 A complex adaptive
system is complex because the behavior of the system
as a whole cannot be projected trivially from the
microbehavior of its individual components, and
adaptive because this microbehavior changes and
develops in response to historical experience and
external pressures from the wider environment. A lan-
guage community comprises a multitude of language
users, whose individual linguistic interactions change
according to their previous linguistic experience
and their wider social motivations30 ; the linguistic
structures in the community are emergent, deriving
from conventionalized generalized patterns extracted
from the communicative interactions, but without
any kind of central control, pre-specification, or
explicit optimisation.63,64 Exploring actual complex
adaptive systems is not trivial, of course: it is effec-
tively impossible to carry out a sufficiently detailed
longitudinal study of a community of language users
in the real world, and the multitude of different
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
wires.wiley.com/cogsci
factors which could influence the system means
that intuitions about their combined effects are very
liable to be erroneous, but ‘it is exactly in these
circumstances, when multiple processes have to be
considered together, that modeling becomes a useful
—and perhaps even necessary— tool’ (Ref 9, p. 13).
Language evolution is not a single complex
adaptive system, however, but rather an interaction
between three separate complex adaptive systems65
which all result in different kinds of language
change, taking place on very different timescales18,66 ;
somewhat confusingly, all of these can be referred
to as ‘language evolution’. During an individual’s
ontogenetic development, they learn and adapt their
linguistic knowledge in response to their environment
and the linguistic experiences they are exposed to.
Such change is most dramatic in children’s initial
language learning, of course, but linguistic knowledge
is constantly in flux, as people respond to the
language used around them by modifying their own
language patterns. Languages themselves change
more slowly, over glossogenetic time,67 through
historical processes such as those which have resulted
in the transformation of Old English into modern
English and through which modern English continues
to develop today. Again, some changes are relatively
small, such as minor changes in pronunciation or
meaning, but others can be very substantial, such as
the loss of a case system or the reorganization of a lan-
guage’s syntactic structure.68 Yet more slowly, over
millennia of phylogenetic time, biological evolution
has endowed the human species with the cognitive
capabilities and physical faculties on which the
continuation of language depends. A full explanation
of how language evolved and continues to change
therefore requires accounts of the biological evolution
of the cognitive and physical foundations of language
and of the cultural evolution of language in dynamic
populations of individuals with these cognitive adap-
tations. Here too, though, some researchers insist on a
clear distinction between the role of cultural evolution
in the initial emergence of language and its role in
more contemporary historical linguistic change,69
while others appeal to parsimony with an account
based on the same cultural evolutionary processes.56
TYPES OF MODEL
Computational Simulations
Computational simulations have been the bedrock of
language evolution models, from the earliest simula-
tions exploring the biological evolution of symbols70
and the ‘critical period’ for language learning,71,72 to
recent simulations investigating the evolution of very
 WIREs Cognitive Science
specific grammatical features.73–76 Many language
processing models use simple recurrent networks77
to explore the conditions under which language can
be learnt from experience. This work has had consid-
erable success in showing that language acquisition
can be accounted for using just general learning
strategies which are not specific to language, and have
consequently posed a major challenge to poverty of
the stimulus argument and thus nativism. They have
shown, for instance, that information extracted from
transitional probabilities between words can allow
learners to correctly distinguish grammatical auxiliary
inversions from ungrammatical inversions in complex
polar interrogative sentences,78 and that networks
can integrate this kind of distributional information
with probabilistic phonological cues to create reliable
and accurate representations of lexical categories.79
Agent-based models of language evolution
typically involve a population of simulated individuals
with some specified cognitive capabilities (such as the
ability to store their experiences and to generalize over
them); the agents interact with each other, adapt their
linguistic knowledge as a result of these interactions,
and may be replaced by other agents as the
simulation unfolds over many hundreds or thousands
of interactions. Agent-based models are probably
the most commonly used technique in evolutionary
linguistic modeling; a formidable range of problems
from the emergence of phonology and phonological
structure,80–82 to the evolution of vocabulary70,83,84
and of syntactic structure53 has been explored using
models with varying levels of complexity from simple
naming games85 to fully-blown implementations like
Fluid Construction Grammar.86 Two key agent-
based paradigms in language evolution research are
the language game model,85,87 which focuses on
the emergence of language through the interactive
negotiation of co-ordinated behavior, and the more
general iterated learning model,65 which focuses on
the transmission of linguistic behavior from one
individual to another.
Language Games
Language games are based on the idea that goal-
driven, context-sensitive communication between
individuals is a key driver behind the self-organization
of language systems; they always therefore contain
a population of individual agents within a specified
environment, with specific goals to communicate with
each other. The agents have the facility to interact
with and perceive the environment, and perhaps to
build and adapt their own individual, internal models
of things they communicate about. In a language
game, two individuals (a speaker and a hearer) must
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Language evolution and change
complete a semiotic cycle: the speaker conceptualizes
what needs to be communicated, and produces
an utterance to represent this conceptualization;
the hearer receives the utterance, reconstructs
the meaning as far as possible and interprets the
meaning based on their own conceptualization of the
environment.
Wellens88 shows in detail how different kinds of
language games require different strategies for agents
to reach their communicative goals. The most basic
language game, the naming game, considers agents
trying to develop and maintain a set of conventional
names for objects in their world. Mechanisms
such as lateral inhibition, which reward successful
words and hinder their competitors, are crucial for
achieving conventionalization in these circumstances.
If ambiguity is introduced between the word and
its referent, in so-called guessing games, then
agents need additionally to use techniques such as
cross-situational learning, a mechanism which allows
multiple possible meanings to be stored for each
word, and for the meanings of words to be learnt in
the face of uncertainty across multiple exposures.89 If
even more meaning uncertainty is facilitated through
the introduction of semantic multidimensionality
and compositionality, a more flexible semantic
representation is required; shared conventions then
come about through the gradual adaptation of these
internal representations to reflect usage rather than
through the elimination of competitor words.88
Language games have been devised to explore
not only the development of shared lexicons as
described above,59,88,90–94 but also the emergence of
compositional language,95 and they are increasingly
used to probe the development of specific and
more complex grammatical features such as case
systems,73 Aktionsart,74 quantifiers75 and gram-
matical agreement.76 In all these cases, the desired
features emerge because the models implement both
functional pressures which make the linguistic struc-
tures desirable and useful, and appropriate cognitive
mechanisms which allow them to be represented.
Iterated Learning
The iterated learning model65,96,97 is designed to
investigate the relationship between the properties
of individual language learners embedded within a
transmission chain,98 and the resultant structure of the
language they use. Iterated learning is most frequently
associated with a specific type of vertical transmission
through generations, but is really a much more
general concept which also encompasses ‘horizontal’
negotiation of conventions within a generation as
in the language game model. Iterated learning can be
 Advanced Review
described as ‘a process in which an individual acquires
a behavior by observing a similar behavior in another
individual who acquired it in the same way’ (Ref
99, p. 10681). This notion is clearly applicable to
the transmission of human language described above:
one individual’s linguistic behavior is the source for
others to create their internal representations, and the
internal representation which yielded their behavior
was the result of previous exposure to others’ linguistic
behavior. Many computational simulations of iterated
learning have been implemented,53,100–103 using a
wide variety of both different models of learning and
of meaning, but the constant result is clear: the simple
process of repeated learning from others’ behavior is
sufficient to transform initially random languages into
stable, complex languages with syntactic structure,
demonstrating the key role of cultural evolution in the
evolution of language.
Kirby’s initial model53 showed how formal
models can yield important knowledge in addition
to the simple confirmation or disconfirmation of a
theoretical proposal: the model was designed as an
explicit exploration of a somewhat controversial
theory of the development of protolanguage into
language,104 but turned out not only to confirm
that fractionation was indeed a plausible mechanism
for this process, but also more importantly that a
crucial factor in its operation was what has become
known as the transmission bottleneck, or the fact
that learners are required to learn the language from
a restricted set of data. Learners in the simulation
were asked to produce utterances for meanings
they had never encountered, and this forced them
to generalize from the data they had encountered.
This pressure for generalization favors compositional
rules with systematic relationships between form and
meaning over holistic rules where the form-meaning
relationships are idiosyncratic, so over repeated gen-
erations, the holistic rules in the languages gradually
disappear.53 This finding led to a series of further
computational95,100,105 and mathematical96,106 mod-
els exploring the same basic model under different
parameter settings; these showed that holistic rules
can only persist in a language if they are very
frequent,100 if the meanings expressed in the language
are unstructured,96 or if the meanings are unrelated
to each other.105 These and similar modifications of
the assumptions on which the original model was
based have also improved our understanding of the
requirements for the cultural evolution of composi-
tionality: it is crucial, for instance, that there exists
not only a pressure for generalization but also a bias
against ambiguity as without it the language collapses
into a maximally ambiguous but highly generalizable
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
wires.wiley.com/cogsci
state where every meaning is expressed with the same
utterance.99,107
Both the language game and iterated learning
paradigms have proved very successful, and their
use in explorations of language evolution and
change has been substantially broadened from these
computational origins into a variety of arenas, the
most important of which may be the implementation
of language agents in physical robots, formal math-
ematical models, and the recent use of psychological
‘human simulation’ experiments.
Robotic Agents
The earliest language games were developed not
in simulations, but on actual physical robots with
crude sensorimotor facilities, which moved about
and explored their environment.90,108,109 Later, in the
famous ‘Talking Heads’ experiment,91 robot cameras
in labs across the world were connected through the
Internet and used language games to develop a shared
language with which to describe the colored shapes on
the whiteboards they faced. As technology has con-
tinued to improve, researchers have expanded their
experimental platforms to include AIBO robot dogs110
and even humanoid robots.111 The main advantage
to using robotic agents over computer simulations
is realism, particularly in experiments designed to
explore theories such as embodied cognition.112–114
Mobile robots were used, for instance, in a remarkable
demonstration of the emergence of a communication
system from noncommunicative behavior.115 The
robots could detect each other’s presence, and were
evolved simply for their ability to move in the same
direction as each other; a simple communication
system emerged, however, as they oscillated in and
out of range of each other, setting up a proposed
direction of travel for one robot to follow the other.
More common, however, is the use of robots in
situations where communicability is already assumed,
and modelers explore the conditions favorable to the
development of language-like systems. In practice,
however, experiments with robots are very intensive
and time-consuming, requiring complex processing
of the raw data captured by the robotic sensors to
abstract information of interest, and considerable
hardware maintenance costs116,117 ; many researchers
therefore use simulated robotic frameworks118,119
to avoid these issues. Robot simulations like this
have been used to demonstrate that cultural imitation
is a much more successful learning strategy than
receiving feedback from the environment,120 once an
initial core set of sensorimotor categories has been
developed through direct grounding.
 WIREs Cognitive Science
Mathematical Models
Mathematical models have frequently been used to
provide definitive proofs in place of the interpretative
conclusions derived from simulations, yet simulations
are often also required to supplement mathematical
models in cases where the problem cannot be
simplified sufficiently to be analytically tractable. Two
examples of the interplay between simulations and
mathematical models, which also serve to show how
apparently minor changes in the assumptions of a
model can have profound effects on its results, can be
found in a series of papers exploring the relationship
between biology and culture in language evolution.
The first set of models were inspired by
the iterated learning simulations which showed the
power of cultural evolution,121 and had learners
use Bayesian inference to choose a grammar based
on the linguistic data they are exposed to. An
initial mathematical analysis showed that the learners’
innate prior bias was the sole factor determining the
languages which emerged from the cultural evolution
process122 : the transmission bottleneck surprisingly
had no effect at all. This result, however, was itself
later shown66,123 to be solely due to an assumption
in the model that the selection of a grammar
was proportional to the learner’s confidence in the
grammar having produced the data (i.e. learning
was by sampling); if learners instead select the
grammar which maximizes the posterior probability,
the size of the transmission bottleneck is crucial
in determining the stable distribution of languages,
as in the simulations. This happens because in the
maximizing case, it is only important to know which
language is preferred (how much it is preferred over
the others does not matter); the resultant distribution
of languages therefore reflects the learners’ prior biases
only approximately.20 Further work evaluating these
two models of learning shows that learners who
maximize are more likely to be selected than learners
who sample,20 and that very weak general biases are
favored over strongly constraining biases.
The second body of research explored the power
of cross-situational learning in the rapid acquisition
of large human-size vocabularies of around 60,000
words.124 An initial mathematical analysis showed
that cross-situational learning allows large vocabular-
ies to be learnt at reasonable speeds,125 even when the
context of unintended meanings which accompanied
the word’s true meaning was large. Subsequent
simulations, however, showed that this result rested
on the assumption that unintended meanings were
uniformly distributed; under more realistic Zipfean
distributions, increases in context size resulted
in super-exponential growth in learning times.126
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Language evolution and change
This simulation result was confirmed by further
mathematical analysis, which additionally showed,
however, that mutual exclusivity, the assumption
that different words have different meanings,127 is
an extraordinarily powerful heuristic which enables
words to be learnt through cross-situational learning
almost as quickly as they are encountered.128
Mathematical models have also been used to
illustrate a great many other theories of language
evolution, from theoretical treatments of language
games,129–131 through dynamical systems models
of language acquisition132 and of the emergence of
combinatoriality36 and Universal Grammar,37 to
models showing that cognitive constraints across
generations give rise to consistent word order
regularities without Universal Grammar,133 and that
superficially combinatorial ‘phonological’ structures
can emerge in a single system, when it is optimized
for acoustic distinctiveness and robustness against
noise.82 They are very frequently used in models of
language change which try to explain specific soci-
olinguistic phenomena such as the selective pressures
behind the diffusion of linguistic variants within an
individual’s linguistic representations134 and within
populations,135 and the process of language shift
through competition between languages, which has
been used to support language planning work to
maintain minority languages.136–138 Perhaps most
notably, Trudgill’s theory of new dialect formation139
was thoroughly investigated using a mathematical
model of language change based on Croft’s theory of
utterance selection46 and real-world data from New
Zealand140 ; the analysis showed that although the
linguistic characteristics of the dialect were indeed
consistent with the theory, the timescale required for
the dialect’s emergence made this impossible.
Experimental Approaches
Over the last few years, researchers have developed a
suite of experimental techniques using human partici-
pants to observe the emergence and evolution of new
languages and communication systems directly69,141 ;
most of these were directly influenced by earlier
computational models. The first study to take this
approach was an experiment exploring the invention
and use of a signaling system by pairs of partici-
pants trying to co-ordinate their movement around
a simple grid on a computer screen.142 Participants
were provided with a communication channel which
cleverly rendered existing communication systems use-
less, yet provided other possibilities; after many trials,
these were exploited by some pairs, who developed
conventionalized and (under certain circumstances)
 Advanced Review
compositional language-like systems. The communi-
cation channel itself was removed in a fascinating and
ingenious subsequent experiment,143 where the only
behavior open to participants was their own move-
ment around the grid. Communication is extraor-
dinarily difficult in these conditions, yet possible if
the pairs had a common understanding of expected
behavior, and could therefore signal their communica-
tive intent by movement which was clearly different
from those expectations.
A related technique which also eschews existing
communication systems is graphical communication
or Pictionary experiments, in which one participant
draws and the other guesses their intended
referent.144–147 Initially, the drawings used must be
externally motivated in some way if they are to
be communicatively useful, but over repeated use
between participants they become simplified and
conventionalized, as the information held in them
effectively moves from the drawings themselves to
the participants’ memory of the their use in shared
interactions.144,148 Simplification also occurs when
participants make use of pre-existing structure in the
meaning space from which the referents are taken,
and develop systematic, compositional drawings
which match this underlying structure.147 In such
experiments, the referents are usually chosen from
a small, pre-defined set, but recent theoretical work
supported by computational models149 suggests that
this ‘drift to the arbitrary’150 in shared communication
systems is a much more general process, underpinned
by the so-called metaphorical use of signs, which are
used to represent meanings slightly different from
their motivated meaning but still inferable from the
communicative context.61
Experimental approaches have also been used to
confirm the results of earlier computational models,
most notably in relation to iterated learning across
chains of participants. In the most celebrated of these,
participants were asked to learn an ‘alien’ language
of random strings paired with a set of structured
meanings; they were tested on their learning, and
REFERENCES
1. Botha RP. Unravelling the Evolution of Language.
Amsterdam: Elsevier; 2003.
2. Fitch WT. The Evolution of Language. Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press; 2010.
3. McMahon A, McMahon R. Evolutionary Linguistics.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 2013.
4. Hurford JR, Studdert-Kennedy M, Knight C, eds.
Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
wires.wiley.com/cogsci
their answers were used as the training data for
the next participant.98 In the basic experiment, the
resultant languages tend to degenerate, with few
distinct words being used, and whole dimensions
of the underlying meaning structures being lost;
the languages become easy to learn but have little
expressive power. If this expressive power is explicitly
maintained, however, by ensuring that the same
word cannot refer to multiple objects, then the
languages change to become easy to learn in a
different way, becoming compositional to reflect
the underlying meaning structure, in a result very
reminiscent of Kirby’s earlier computational model.53
The authors argue convincingly that communication
provides the natural pressure for the utility of a
communication system, and that human language
is thus the dynamic result of a balancing act
between learnability and expressivity. Experiments
like this have now demonstrated the emergence of
communication systems in general,143 and many of
the key design features of language such as symbolism
and compositionality in particular,144,147 showing
that the process of cultural transmission has a key
and multifaceted explanatory role in the evolution of
language.
CONCLUSION
Formal models of language evolution and change are
an invaluable technique which allows theories to be
tested, evaluated, and revised in a systematic way.
They are particularly useful in situations where the
object of study is the result of interactions between
a number of complex adaptive systems. Formal
models have been used to investigate many different
aspects of language evolution and change, and have
developed from their computational beginnings in
both complexity and scope, most notably with the
advent of laboratory experiments which have been
used not only to confirm model predictions but also
to provide additional ecological validity.
and Cognitive Bases. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press; 1998.
5. Knight C, Studdert-Kennedy M, Hurford J, eds.
The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social
Functions and the Origins of Linguistic Form.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 2000.
6. Briscoe E, ed. Linguistic Evolution through Lan-
guage Acquisition: Formal and Computational
 WIREs Cognitive Science
Models. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press;
2002.
7. Cangelosi A, Parisi D, eds. Simulating the Evolution
of Language. London: Springer; 2002.
8. Wray A, ed. The Transition to Language. Studies in
the Evolution of Language. Oxford: Oxford University
Press; 2002.
9. Christiansen MH, Kirby S, eds. Language Evolution.
Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2003.
10. Tallerman M, ed. Language Origins: Perspectives on
Evolution. Studies in the Evolution of Language.
Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005.
11. Minett JW, Wang WSY. Language Acquisition,
Change and Emergence: Essays in Evolutionary
Linguistics. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong
Press; 2005.
12. Cangelosi A, Smith ADM, Smith K, eds. The Evolution
of Language: Proceedings of the 6th International
Conference. Singapore: World Scientific Press; 2006.
13. Smith ADM, Smith K, Ferrer i Cancho R, eds. The
Evolution of Language (EVOLANG 7). Singapore:
World Scientific; 2008.
14. Larson RK, Déprez V, Yamakido H, eds. The Evolu-
tion of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 2010.
15. Smith ADM, Schouwstra M, de Boer B, Smith K,
eds. The Evolution of Language (EVOLANG 8).
Singapore: World Scientific; 2010.
16. Tallerman M, Gibson KR, eds. The Oxford Handbook
of Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University
Press; 2011.
17. Scott-Phillips TC, Tamariz M, Cartmill EA, Hurford
JR, eds. The Evolution of Language (EVOLANG 9).
Singapore: World Scientific Press; 2012.
18. Binder PM, Smith K, eds. The Language Phenomenon.
London: Springer; 2013.
19. Hockett CF. The origin of speech. Sci Am 1960,
203:88–96.
20. Smith K, Kirby S. Cultural evolution: implications
for understanding the human language faculty and its
evolution. Philos Trans R Soc Lond Ser B Biol Sci
2008, 363:3591–3603.
21. de Saussure F. Course in General Linguistics. New
York: The Philosophical Library; 1959[Translated by
Wade Baskin].
22. Martinet A. La double articulation linguistique.
Travaux du Cercle Linguistic de Copenhague 1949,
5:30–37.
23. Kinsella AR. Language Evolution and Syntactic
Theory. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press;
2009.
24. Hauser MD, Chomsky N, Fitch WT. The faculty of
language: what is it, who has it and how did it evolve?
Science 2002, 298:1569–1579.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Language evolution and change
25. Krifka M. Compositionality. In: Wilson RA, Keil F,
eds. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2001.
26. Okanoya K. Sexual display as a syntactic vehicle:
the evolution of syntax in birdsong and human
language through sexual selection. In: Wray A, ed. The
Transition to Language. Oxford: Oxford University
Press; 2002, 46–64.
27. Suzuki R, Buck JR, Tyack PL. Information Entropy
of Humpback Whale Songs. J Acoust Soc Am 2006,
119:1849–1866.
28. Smith K. Why formal models are useful for
evolutionary linguists. In: Gibson KR, Tallerman
M, eds. Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution.
Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2011.
29. Gell-Mann M. The Quark and the Jaguar. New York:
Freeman; 1994.
30. Beckner C, Blythe RA, Bybee JL, Christiansen MH,
Croft W, Ellis NC, Holland J, Ke J, Larsen-
Freeman D, Schoenemann T. Language is a complex
adaptive system: position paper. Lang Learn 2009,
59(S1):1–26.
31. Chomsky N. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1965.
32. Chomsky N. Rules and Representations. London: Basil
Blackwell; 1980.
33. Pullum GK, Scholz BC. Empirical assessment of
stimulus poverty arguments. Linguist Rev 2002, 19(1-
2):9–50.
34. Pinker S, Bloom P. Natural language and natural
selection. Behav Brain Sci 1990, 13:707–784.
35. Oliphant M. The dilemma of Saussurean communica-
tion. BioSystems 1996, 37:31–38.
36. Nowak MA, Krakauer D. The evolution of language.
Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1999, 96:8028–8033.
37. Nowak MA, Komarova NL, Niyogi P. Evolution of
Universal Grammar. Science 2001, 291:114–117.
38. Hinton G, Nowlan S. How learning can guide
evolution. Complex Syst 1987, 1:495–502.
39. Deacon T. The Symbolic Species. London: Penguin;
1997.
40. Briscoe T. Grammatical assimilation. In: Christiansen
M, Kirby S, eds. Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford
University Press; 2003, 295–316.
41. Turkel WJ. The learning guided evolution of
natural language. In: Briscoe E, ed. Linguistic
Evolution through Language Acquisition: Formal and
Computational Models. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press; 2002, 235–254.
42. Yamauchi H. The Difficulty of the Baldwinian Account
of Linguistic Innateness. In: Kelemen J, Sosík P, eds.
In Advances in Artificial Life: Proceedings of the 6th
European Conference on Artificial Life. Heidelberg:
Springer-Verlag; 2001, 391–400.
Advanced Review
43. Yamauchi H, Hashimoto T. Relaxation of selection,
niche construction and the Baldwin Effect in language
evolution. Artif Life 2010, 16:271–287.
44. Odling-Smee FJ, Laland KN, Feldman MW. Niche
construction. Am Nat 1996, 147:641–648.
45. Trask RL. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold;
1996.
46. Croft W. Explaining Language Change: An Evolu-
tionary Approach. Longman: Longman Linguistics
Library; 2000.
47. Munroe S, Cangelosi A. Learning and the Evolution of
Language: the role of cultural variation and learning
costs in the Baldwin effect. Artif Life 2002, 8:331–339.
48. Chater N, Christiansen MH. Language acquisition
meets language evolution. Cognit Sci 2009:1–27.
49. Chater N, Reali F, Christiansen MH. Restrictions on
biological adaptation in language evolution. Proc Natl
Acad Sci USA 2009, 106:1015–1020.
50. Lupyan G, Christiansen MH. Case, Word order
and language learnability: insights from connectionist
modelling. In: Proceedings of the 24th Annual
Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 2002, 596–601.
51. Christiansen MH, Chater N. Language as shaped by
the brain. Behav Brain Sci 2008, 31:489–508.
52. Hurford JR. Expression/induction models of language
evolution: dimensions and issues. In: Briscoe E, ed.
Linguistic Evolution Through Language Acquisition:
Formal and Computational Models. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press; 2002, 301–344.
53. Kirby S. Syntax without natural selection: how
compositionality emerges from vocabulary in a
population of learners. In: Knight C, Studdert-
Kennedy M, Hurford JR, eds. The Evolutionary
Emergence of Language: Social Function and the
Origins of Linguistic Form. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press; 2000, 303–323.
54. Zuidema WH. How the poverty of the stimulus solves
the poverty of the stimulus. In: Becker S, Thrun S,
Obermayer K, eds. Advances in Neural Information
Processing Systems 15 (Proceedings of NIPS ’02).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2003.
55. Sperber D, Wilson D. Relevance: Communication and
Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell; 1995.
56. Hoefler S, Smith ADM. The pre-linguistic basis of
grammaticalisation: a unified approach to metaphor
and reanalysis. Stud Lang 2009, 33:883–906.
57. Scott-Phillips TC. The Pragmatic Ape: Human
Communication and the Evolutionary Origins of
Language. London: Palgrave MacMillan; In press.
58. Hurford JR. The Origins of Meaning: Language in the
Light of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press;
2007.
59. Smith ADM. The inferential transmission of language.
Adapt Behav 2005, 13:311–324.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
wires.wiley.com/cogsci
60. Smith ADM. Protolanguage reconstructed. Interact
Stud 2008, 9:100–116.
61. Smith ADM, Hoefler SH. The pivotal role of metaphor
in the evolution of human language. In: Vera JED, ed.
Metaphor and Metonymy through Time and Culture.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; In press.
62. Smith K. Cultural evolution of language. In: Brown
K, ed. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.
New York: Elsevier; 2006, 315–322.
63. Hopper PJ. Emergent grammar. BLS 1987,
13:139–157.
64. Bybee JL. From usage to grammar: the mind’s response
to repetition. Language 2006, 82:711–733.
65. Kirby S, Hurford JR. The emergence of linguistic
structure: an overview of the iterated learning model.
In: Cangelosi A, Parisi D, eds. Simulating the
Evolution of Language. London: Springer Verlag;
2002, 121–148.
66. Kirby S, Dowman M, Griffiths TL. Innateness and
culture in the evolution of language. Proc Natl Acad
Sci USA 2007, 104:5241–5245.
67. Hurford JR. Nativist and functional explanations in
language acquisition. In: Roca IM, ed. Logical Issues
in Language Acquisition. Berlin: de Gruyter; 1990,
85–136.
68. Lass R. Historical Linguistics and Language Change.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 1997.
69. Scott-Phillips TC, Kirby S. Language evolution in the
laboratory. Trends Cogn Sci 2010:898.
70. Hurford JR. Biological evolution of the Saussurean
sign as a component of the language acquisition device.
Lingua 1989, 77:187–222.
71. Hurford JR. The evolution of critical period for
language acquisition. Cognition 1991, 40:159–201.
72. Batali J. Innate biases and critical periods: Combining
evolution and learning in the acquisition of syntax. In:
Brooks R, Maes P, eds. Artificial Life 4: Proceedings of
the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis
and Simulation of Living Systems. Redwood City, CA:
Addison-Wesley; 1994, 160–171.
73. van Trijp R. The evolution of case systems for
marking event structure. In: Experiments in Cultural
Language Evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins;
2012, 169–206.
74. Gerasymova K, Spranger M, Beuls K. A language
strategy for aspect: encoding Aktionsarten through
morphology. In: Steels L, ed. Experiments in Cultural
Language Evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins;
2012, 257–276.
75. Pauw S, Hilferty J. The emergence of quantifiers.
In: Steels L, ed. Experiments in Cultural Language
Evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; 2012,
277–303.
 WIREs Cognitive Science
76. Beuls K, Steels L. Agent-based models of strategies
for the emergence and evolution of grammatical
agreement. PLoS One 2013, 8:358960.
77. Elman J. Finding structure in time. Cognit Sci 1990,
14:179–211.
78. Reali F, Christiansen MH. Uncovering the richness
of the stimulus: structure dependence and indirect
statistical evidence. Cognit Sci 2005, 29:1007–1028.
79. Reali F, Christiansen MH, Monaghan P. Phonological
and distributional cues in syntax acquisition: scaling
up the connectionist approach to multiple-cue
integration. In: Alterman R, Kirsh D, eds. Proceedings
of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science
Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates;
2003, 970–975.
80. de Boer B. The Origins of Vowel Systems. Oxford:
Oxford University Press; 2001.
81. Oudeyer PY. The Self-Organization of Speech. Studies
in the Evolution of Language. Oxford: Oxford
University Press; 2006.
82. Zuidema W, de Boer B. The evolution of combinatorial
phonology. J Phon 2009, 37:125–144.
83. Steels L, Kaplan F. Bootstrapping grounded word
semantics. In: Briscoe E, ed. Linguistic Evolution
through Language Acquisition: Formal and Computa-
tional Models. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press; 2002, 53–73.
84. Smith K. The evolution of vocabulary. J Theor Biol
2004, 228:127–142.
85. Steels L. A self-organizing spatial vocabulary. Artif
Life 1995, 2:319–332.
86. Steels L. Design Patterns in Fluid Construction
Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; 2011.
87. Nowak MA, Plotkin JB, Krakauer D. The evolutionary
language game. J Theor Biol 1999, 200:147–162.
88. Wellens P. Adaptive Strategies in the Emergence of
Lexical Systems. Brussels: VUB Press; 2012.
89. Siskind JM. A computational study of cross-situational
techniques for learning word-to-meaning mappings.
Cognition 1996, 61:39–91.
90. Steels L, Vogt P. Grounding adaptive language
games in robotic agents. In: Husbands P, Harvey I,
eds. Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1997, 474–482.
91. Steels L. The Talking Heads Experiment, Volume I.
Words and Meanings. Antwerp: Laboratorium; 1999.
92. Smith ADM. Intelligent Meaning Creation in a
Clumpy World Helps Communication. Artif Life
2003, 9:175–190.
93. Vogt P, Coumans H. Investigating social inter-
action strategies for bootstrapping lexicon devel-
opment. J Artif Soc Social Simul 2003, 6.
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/6/1/4.html.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Language evolution and change
94. Steels L, Belpaeme T. Coordinating perceptually
grounded categories through language: a case study
for colour. Behav Brain Sci 2005, 28:469–529.
95. Vogt P. The emergence of compositional structures
in perceptually grounded language games. Artif Intell
2005, 167(1-2):206–242.
96. Brighton H. Compositional syntax from cultural
transmission. Artif Life 2002, 8:25–54.
97. Smith K, Kirby S, Brighton H. Iterated Learning: a
framework for the emergence of language. Artif Life
2003, 9:371–386.
98. Mesoudi A. Using The Methods of Experimental Social
Psychology to Study Cultural Evolution. J Soc Exp
Cult Psychol 2007, 1:35–58.
99. Kirby S, Cornish H, Smith K. Cumulative Cultural
Evolution in the Lab: an experimental approach to
the origins of structure in human language. Proc Natl
Acad Sci USA 2008, 105:10681–10686.
100. Kirby S. Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure:
an iterated learning model of the emergence of
regularity and irregularity. IEEE J Evol Comput 2001,
5:102–110.
101. Batali J. Computational simulations of the emergence
of grammar. In: Hurford JR, Studdert-Kennedy M,
Knight C, eds. Approaches to the Evolution of
Language: social and cognitive bases. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press; 1998, 405–426.
102. Tonkes B. On the origins of linguistic structure:
computational models of the evolution of language.
PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2002.
103. Batali J. The negotiation and acquisition of recursive
grammars as a result of competition among exemplars.
In: Briscoe E, ed. Linguistic Evolution through
Language Acquisition: Formal and Computational
Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
2002, 111–172.
104. Wray A. Protolanguage as a holistic system for social
interaction. Lang Commun 1998, 18:47–67.
105. Smith K, Brighton H, Kirby S. Complex Systems
in Language Evolution: the cultural emergence of
compositional structure. Adv Complex Syst 2003,
6:537–558.
106. Brighton H. Simplicity as a driving force in linguistic
evolution. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003.
107. Brighton H, Smith K, Kirby S. Language as an
evolutionary system. Phys Life Rev 2005, 2:177–226.
108. Billard A, Dautenhahn K. Experiments in learning by
imitation - grounding and use of communication in
robotic agents. Adapt Behav 1999, 7(3/4):415–438.
109. Vogt P. Lexicon grounding on mobile robots. PhD
thesis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2000.
110. Steels L, Loetzsch M. Perspective alignment in spatial
language. In: Coventry KR, Tenbrink T, Bateman
JA, eds. Spatial Language and Dialogue. Oxford
University Press; 2009, 70–88.
 Advanced Review
111. Steels L, Spranger M. The robot in the mirror. Connect
Sci 2008, 20:337–358.
112. Lakoff G. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things:
What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press; 1987.
113. Lakoff G, Johnson M. Philosophy in the Flesh:
The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western
Thought. New York: Basic Books; 1999.
114. Pecher D, Zwaan RA, eds. Grounding Cognition: The
Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language
and Thinking. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press; 2005.
115. Quinn M. Evolving Communication without Dedi-
cated Communication Channels. In: Kelemen J, Sosík
P, eds. Advances in Artificial Life: Proceedings of the
6th European Conference on Artificial Life, Prague,
September 2001. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag; 2001,
357–366.
116. Vogt P. Language evolution and robotics: issues on
symbol grounding and language acquisition. In: Loula
A, Gudwin R, Queiroz J, eds. Artificial Cognition
Systems. London: Idea Group; 2006, 176–209.
117. Steels L. Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins; 2012.
118. Vogt P. THSim v3.2: the Talking Heads simulation
tool. In: Banzhaf W, Christaller T, Ziegler J, Dittrich
P, Kim JT, eds. Advances in Artificial Life: Proceedings
of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Lecture Notes
in Artificial Intelligence. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag;
2003, 535–544.
119. Tikhanoff V, Cangelosi A, Fitzpatrick P, Metta G,
Natale L, Nori F. An open-source simulator for
cognitive robotics research: the prototype of the
iCub Humanoid Robot Simulator. In: Madhavan
R, Messina ER, eds. Proceedings of the IEEE
Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent
Systems (PerMIS’08). New York: IEEE; 2008.
120. Cangelosi A, Harnad S. The adaptive advantage
of symbolic theft over sensorimotor toil: grounding
language in perceptual categories. Evol Commun
2000, 4:119–144.
121. Kirby S. Learning, bottlenecks and the evolution
of recursive syntax. In: Briscoe E, ed. Linguistic
Evolution through Language Acquisition: Formal and
Computational Models. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press; 2002, 173–203.
122. Griffiths TL, Kalish ML. A Bayesian view of language
evolution by iterated learning. In: Bara BG, Barsalou
L, Bucciarelli M, eds. Proceedings of the 27th Annual
Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah,
NJ: Cognitive Science Society; 2005, 827–832.
123. Griffiths TL, Kalish ML. Language Evolution by
Iterated Learning with Bayesian Agents. Cognit Sci
2007, 31:441–480.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
wires.wiley.com/cogsci
124. Bloom P. How Children Learn the Meanings of Words.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2000.
125. Blythe RA, Smith K, Smith ADM. Learning times
for large lexicons through cross-situational learning.
Cognit Sci 2010, 34:620–642.
126. Vogt P. Exploring the robustness of cross-situational
learning under Zipfian distributions. Cognit Sci 2012,
36:726–739.
127. Markman EM, Wachtel GF. Children’s use of mutual
exclusivity to constrain the meaning of words. Cogn
Psychol 1988, 20:121–157.
128. Reisenauer R, Smith K, Blythe RA. Stochastic
dynamics of lexicon learning in an uncertain and
nonuniform world. Phys Rev Lett 2013, 110:258701.
129. Lenaerts T, Jansen B, Tuyls K, de Vylder B. The
evolutionary language game: an orthogonal approach.
J Theor Biol 2005, 235:566–582.
130. Baronchelli A, Felici M, Loreto V, Caglioti E, Steels
L. Sharp transition towards shared vocabularies in
multi-agent systems. J Stat Mech 2006:P06014.
131. Baronchelli A, Loreto V, Steels L. In-depth analysis of
the naming games dynamics: the homogenous mixing
case. Int J Mod Phys C 2008, 19:785–812.
132. Niyogi P, Berwick R. A dynamical systems model of
language change. Linguist Philos 1997:17.
133. Reali F, Christiansen MH. Sequential learning and
the interaction between biological and linguistic
adaptation in language evolution. Interact Stud 2009,
10:5–30.
134. Wedel AB. Exemplar models, evolution and language
change. Linguist Rev 2006, 23:247–274.
135. Gong T, Shuai L, Tamariz M, Jäger G. Studying
language change using price equation and Pólya-Urn
dynamics. PLoS One 2012, 7:e33171.
136. Minett JW, Wang WSY. Modeling endangered
languages: the effects of bilingualism and social
structure. Lingua 2008, 118:19–45.
137. Kandler A, Unger R, Steele J. Language shift,
bilingualism and the future of Britain’s Celtic
languages. Philos Trans R Soc Lond Ser B Biol Sci
2010, 365:3855–3864.
138. Bakalis E, Galani A. Modeling language evolution:
Aromanian, an endangered language in Greece.
Physica A 2012, 391:4963–4969.
139. Trudgill P. New Dialect Formation: The Inevitability
of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press; 2004.
140. Baxter G, Blythe RA, Croft W, McKane A. Modeling
language change: an evaluation of Trudgill’s theory of
the emergence of New Zealand English. Lang Variat
Change 2009, 21:257–296.
141. Galantucci B, Garrod S. Experimental semiotics: a
review. Front Hum Neurosci 2011, 5:11.
 WIREs Cognitive Science
142. Galantucci B. An experimental study of the emergence
of human communication systems. Cognit Sci 2005,
29:737–767.
143. Scott-Phillips T, Kirby S, Ritchie G. Signalling
Signalhood and the Emergence of Communication.
Cognition 2009, 113:226–233.
144. Garrod S, Fay N, Lee J, Oberlander J, MacLeod
T. Foundations of representations: where might
graphical symbol systems come from? Cognit Sci 2007,
31:961–987.
145. Fay N, Garrod S, Roberts L. The fitness and
functionality of culturally evolved communication
systems. Philos Trans R Soc Lond Ser B Biol Sci
2008, 363:3553–3561.
146. Fay N, Garrod S, Roberts L, Swoboda N. The
interactive evolution of human communication
systems. Cognit Sci 2010, 34:351–386.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Language evolution and change
147. Theisen C, Oberlander J, Kirby S. Systematicity and
arbitrariness in novel communication systems. Interact
Stud 2010, 11:14–32.
148. Caldwell CA, Smith K. Cultural evolution and
perpetuation of arbitrary communicative conventions
in experimental microsocieties. PLoS One 2012,
7:e43807.
149. Hoefler S. Modelling the role of pragmatic plasticity in
the evolution of linguistic communication. PhD Thesis,
University of Edinburgh, 2009.
150. Tomasello M. Origins of Human Communication.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2008.