Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Puglisi A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2430341 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Jun
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories.
Puglisi Andrea A Baronchelli Andrea A Loreto Vittorio V
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20080603 23
Categories provide a coarse-grained description of the world. A fundamental question is whether categories simply mirror an underlying structure of nature or instead come from the complex interactions of human beings among themselves and with the environment. Here, we address this question by modeling a population of individuals who co-evolve their own system of symbols and meanings by playing elementary language games. The central result is the emergence of a hierarchical category structure mad ...[more]
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