On the Relevance of Language Evolution Models for Cognitive Science

We argue that Cognitive Science can profit from the study of language evolution. Research in language evolution is concerned with the question of how complex linguistic structures can emerge from the interactions between many communicating individuals. As such it complements psycholinguistics which investigates the processes involved in individual adult language processing, and child language development studies, investigating how children learn a given language. We focus on the framework of language games and argue that they offer a fresh and formal perspective on many current debates in Cognitive Science, including those on the synchronic vs. diachronic perspective on language, the embodiment and situatedness of language and cognition, and the selforganization of linguistic patterns. We present a model of lexical dynamics that shows the spontaneous emergence of near-optimal characteristics of a lexicon in a distributed population of individuals. Finally, we analyze the shortcomings of our models and discuss how research in Cognitive Science could contribute to improving them.