2026· Journal of Language Evolution· Vol 11· 0 citations· 41 references
Abstract
Human languages are widely understood to be conventional: for a given meaning, a population of language users expect a certain form to be used. Given the lack of unconventional natural languages with which to compare, there is little direct empirical evidence which explains why linguistic conventionality matters. We carry out a series of emergent language experiments with artificial agents designed to exhibit the effect of conventionality on robustness, learnability, and cognitive efficiency. By experimentally manipulating the interaction dynamics through which agents align their vocabularies, we create conditions that either promote or prevent population-level convergence, resulting in conventional and unconventional emergent languages while holding communicative success constant. We find that conventional languages are indeed more robust, better learnable, and more efficient, when compared with less conventional languages.
Linguistic typology has identified properties shared by the world’s languages, as well as features with respect to which languages diverge, including infrequent or rare phenomena. Cognitive biases are one important source of language universals, through their indirect effect on language change via their impact on langu...
Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Sihan Chen, D. Gil· Linguistic Typology at the C...· 0 citations
Analysis of internal representations indicate that language models process unlike coordination by treating the conjoined elements as belonging to similar structural categories or through a mechanism akin to deletion, both of which appear learnable from exposure to alike coordination alone.
It is concluded that explaining how language can emerge from neural population codes, in both biological and artificial systems, will not be achieved through the incremental refinement of algebraic-symbolic theories but will demand new theoretical paradigms.
Samuel A. Nastase, Zaid Zada, A. Goldberg et al.· Neuron· 1 citation
Syntactic convergence (the tendency of speakers to adapt in language towards the grammatical profiles of their interlocutors) is a well-documented feature of human dialogue widely considered to operate below conscious awareness. Whether large language models exhibit analogous syntactic convergence toward human users re...
The central contributions of this paper articulate the conditions under which distributional predictability threatens the internal validity of an experiment and provide concrete recommendations for how to control for this potential confound.
Sean Trott, James A. Michaelov, Cameron R. Jones et al.· Open Mind· 0 citations
It is suggested that the state is a systemic, context-dependent morphosyntactic mechanism that selects grammatical templates across synthetic languages and constitutes one instance of a broader class of syntactically conditioned dependencies that also includes agreement and grammatical case.
M. E. Idrissi· 0 citations
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