title: Intelligent meaning creation in a clumpy world helps communication.
abstract: This article investigates the problem of how language learners decipher what words mean. In many recent models of language evolution, agents are provided with innate meanings a priori and explicitly transfer them to each other as part of the communication process. By contrast, I investigate how successful communication systems can emerge without innate or transferable meanings, and show that this is dependent on the agents developing highly synchronized conceptual systems. I present experiments with various cognitive, communicative, and environmental factors which affect the likelihood of agents achieving meaning synchronization and demonstrate that an intelligent meaning creation strategy in a clumpy world leads to the highest level of meaning similarity between agents.
authors.affiliation: Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. andrew@ling.ed.ac.uk
authors.forename: Andrew D M
authors.initials: AD
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D007802:Language; D008962:Models, Theoretical