title: Exploring the effect of power law social popularity on language evolution.
abstract: We evaluate the effect of a power-law-distributed social popularity on the origin and change of language, based on three artificial life models meticulously tracing the evolution of linguistic conventions including lexical items, categories, and simple syntax. A cross-model analysis reveals an optimal social popularity, in which the λ value of the power law distribution is around 1.0. Under this scaling, linguistic conventions can efficiently emerge and widely diffuse among individuals, thus maintaining a useful level of mutual understandability even in a big population. From an evolutionary perspective, we regard this social optimality as a tradeoff among social scaling, mutual understandability, and population growth. Empirical evidence confirms that such optimal power laws exist in many large-scale social systems that are constructed primarily via language-related interactions. This study contributes to the empirical explorations and theoretical discussions of the evolutionary relations between ubiquitous power laws in social systems and relevant individual behaviors.
authors.affiliation: University of Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.forename: Lan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Shuai
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008962:Models, Theoretical
keywords: Social scaling; computer simulation; mutual understanding; self-organization