Lexical Redundancy, Naming Game and Self-constrained Synonymy

Language games are tools to model some aspects of the social aspects of language and communication. Our approach aims to cover the ground between the elementary naming game and the complex models for social use, for the growth of possibly redundant community and personal lexicons. It uses weighted lists of words for the personal lexicon, probabilistic choice as a selection mechanism and lateral inhibition as the weight update scheme. The results demonstrate that the model is a generalization of the elementary naming game, and it provides a good picture of how big a lexicon agents use for the task, how this size can be controlled using the model parameters and a possible way of explaining how synonymy is kept under control.