The DOI matches its Crossref record; 52 of the 52 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The evolution of language
Open accessAbstract
The emergence of language was a defining moment in the evolution of modern humans. It was an innovation that changed radically the character of human society. Here, we provide an approach to language evolution based on evolutionary game theory. We explore the ways in which protolanguages can evolve in a nonlinguistic society and how specific signals can become associated with specific objects. We assume that early in the evolution of language, errors in signaling and perception would be common. We model the probability of misunderstanding a signal and show that this limits the number of objects that can be described by a protolanguage. This “error limit” is not overcome by employing more sounds but by combining a small set of more easily distinguishable sounds into words. The process of “word formation” enables a language to encode an essentially unlimited number of objects. Next, we analyze how words can be combined into sentences and specify the conditions for the evolution of very simple grammatical rules. We argue that grammar originated as a simplified rule system that evolved by natural selection to reduce mistakes in communication. Our theory provides a systematic approach for thinking about the origin and evolution of human language.
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Cites
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Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics
Hofbauer, J., & Sigmund, K. (1998) · doi:10.1017/cbo9781139173179 · Cited by 5,502
The Adapted mind : evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture
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The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees
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Cited by
Statistical physics of social dynamics
Castellano, C., Fortunato, S., & Loreto, V. (2009) · Reviews of Modern Physics · doi:10.1103/revmodphys.81.591 · Cited by 4,119
The faculty of language: what's special about it?
Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2005) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2004.08.004 · Cited by 631
Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language
Cancho, R. F. I., & Solé, R. V. (2003) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0335980100 · Cited by 588
Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters
Creanza, N., Kolodny, O., & Feldman, M. W. (2017) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1620732114 · Cited by 482
Jackendoff, R., & Pinker, S. (2005) · Cognition · doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.006 · Cited by 499
Metadata
- Authors
- Nowak, M. A., & Krakauer, D. C.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 1999-07-06
- Volume
- 96
- Issue
- 14
- Pages
- 8028-8033
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2144772486
- Cited by
- 474
- References
- 52
- FWCI
- 329.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
