Crucial Factors in the Origins of Word-Meaning

Abstract

Abstract We have been conducting large-scale public experiments with artificial robotic agents to explore what the necessary and sufficient prerequisites are for word-meaning pairs to evolve autonomously in a population of agents through a self-organized process. We focus not so much on the question of why language has evolved, but rather on how. There are many good reasons to use language once it has come into existence; for example, for establishing and maintaining group coherence, for transmission of cultural knowledge such as tool use, etc. But these reasons only explain why verbal behaviour is reinforced. They do not explain how this verbal behaviour might emerge or become complex. Our hypothesis is that when agents engage in particular interactive behaviours that in turn require specific cognitive structures, they automatically arrive at a language system. This interactive behaviour should be a natural outgrowth of co-operative behaviour (if this were not the case, the behaviour would be unlikely to emerge),