Social patterns restrict evolving grammars ( stageverslag )

This paper reports on an internship at the department of theoretical biology at Utrecht University between October 1998 and February 1999. Aim of the project was to implement and study the computational model of language evolution reported by Hashimoto & Ikegami (1996) and to reproduce their results. The project was undertaken as a preparation for more original research for amaster’s thesis, and among other things to improve programming skills and to get more familiar with language evolution and modeling methodology. This report consists of six sections, discussing the origin of language debate, the Hashimoto Ikegami model, the developed implementation, the main results with some hints on subsequent work, conclusions and a short self-evaluation.