How to invent a lexicon: the development of shared symbols in interaction

Abstract

Human language provides, among other things, a mechanism for distinguishing between relevant objects in the natural environment. This mechanism is made up of two components-forms and meanings-which must be shared by the community of language users. The lexicon constitutes much of a language’s form, but its description as a set of shared, form-meaning resources for communication is seldom addressed by formal models of language. This chapter presents a simulation model of how shared symbols (form-meaning pairs) can emerge from the interactions of simple cognitive agents in an artificial world. The problem of creating a lexicon from scratch is solved by having cognitive agents that are capable of organizing themselves internally share their expressions of visual experience in interaction through learning to classify a world of visual phenomena. The model is seen as an instantiation of a theory of cognition which takes symbols to be a product of inter-and intra-individual organizations of behaviour, the result of cultural process.

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