Cultural route to the emergence of linguistic categories

TLDR

Categories offer a coarse‑grained description of the world, raising the question of whether they reflect natural structure or arise from human interaction with each other and the environment. The study models a population of individuals who co‑evolve symbols and meanings through elementary language games to investigate this question. The authors simulate a population engaging in elementary language games that co‑evolve symbols and meanings. The model yields a hierarchical category structure with a fine‑grained basic layer and a shared linguistic layer, and the number of linguistic categories is finite and small, matching natural languages.

Abstract

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 modelling 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 made of two distinct levels: a basic layer, responsible for fine discrimination of the environment, and a shared linguistic layer that groups together perceptions to guarantee communicative success. Remarkably, the number of linguistic categories turns out to be finite and small, as observed in natural languages.