COEXISTING LINGUISTIC CONVENTIONS IN GENERALIZED LANGUAGE GAMES

摘要

The Naming Game is a well known model in which a population of individu-als agrees on the use of a simple convention (e.g. the name to give to an object)without resorting to any central coordination, but on the contrary exploiting onlylocal interactions (Steels, 1996; Baronchelli, Felici, Caglioti, Loreto, & Steels,2006). It is the simplest model in which the idea that language can be seen as acomplex adaptive system (Steels, 2000) has been applied and challenged and ithas therefore become prototypical. Indeed, its simplicity has allowed for an ex-tensive application of complex systems concepts and techniques to various aspectsof its dynamics, ranging from the self-organizing global behaviors to the role oftopology, and has made it one of the most studied models of language emergenceand evolution (Baronchelli, Felici, et al., 2006; Baronchelli, Dall'Asta, Barrat, &Loreto, 2006).