Language acquisition and evolution

Special Issue: Adaptive Behavior

Call for Papers
(pdf-format)

Guest Editor: Paul Vogt

Submission deadline: 15 November 2004

It is widely believed that language has evolved through mutual interactive behaviour of individuals within an ecological niche, through individual adaptations and self-organisation. Humans communicate with each other about events that happen in their environment. When novel events occur, they might construct new internal representations of these events - either by learning from other's behaviour or by inventing new behaviour. They can then transmit this newly constructed knowledge to other humans. By subsequent local interactions between individuals, self-organisation can guide the emergence of a global structure called language as has repeatedly been shown by several computer models.

Many computational studies on the evolution of language have primarily focused on the idea that language is a complex dynamical adaptive system, as outlined above. Central to these studies is the cultural evolution of language, i.e. language is thought to have evolved based on cultural transmissions rather than on biological adaptations. Cultural transmission of language is impossible without the ability to learn language. This special issue is inspired by a recent Symposium on Language Evolution and Acquisition held at the 2004 Human Behavior & Evolution Society conference, and focuses on the relation between language origins, acquisition and evolution. Two main themes to be explored are how could language acquisition mechanisms have evolved, and the impact that particular acquisition skills may have had on the evolution of language itself.

Adaptive Behavior solicits papers that present synthetic studies that explicitly focuses on the interface between language origins and/or evolution, and language acquisition. The models should involve either computer simulations or robotic platforms. However, those papers that integrate models with psychological, linguistic or biological data are particularly welcome. Papers in this special issue should not exceed the equivalent length of 14 journal pages. See the web-site of the Adaptive Behavior (http://www.isab.org.uk/journal/) for further instructions.

Topics include (though not restricted):

• Evolution of
  • language acquisition skills.
  • joint attention.
  • corrective feedback.
• Phonetics.
• Lexicon formation.
• Meaning inference.
• Symbol grounding in language.
• Emergence of syntax or grammar.
• Language change.
• Language diversity.

If you intend to submit a paper, please send a tentative title and abstract to the guest editor (Paul Vogt). (This would help to speed up the selection of reviewers.) If you are uncertain whether your paper would satisfy the topic of this special issue, or if you wish further information, please contact the guest editor too.

Important dates:

• 15 November 2004: Submission deadline.
• 15 February 2005: Notification of acceptance.
• 15 April 2005: Revised versions due.
• 30 May 2005: Authors notified (for revised papers).
• Late 2005: Special issue appears.

Guest editor:	Editor-in-chief:
Paul Vogt	Peter M. Todd
Language Evolution and Computation	Center for Adaptive Behavior & Cognition
School of Philosophy, Psychology
& Language Sciences
University of Edinburgh	Max Planck Institute for Human Development
40 George Square	Lentzealle 94
Edinburgh, EH8 9LL	D-14195 Berlin
UK	Germany
paulv@ling.ed.ac.uk	editor@adaptive-behavior.org