A First Report on Emergent Phonology

This paper contains a description of two experiments that have been done to test self organisation and cultural evolution as possible mechanisms for explaining the origins of language in general and the origins of phonological systems in particular. Using computer simulations of agents that try to communicate using speech sounds, together with a selectionist algorithm where successful phonemes are kept and unsuccessful ones discarded, an adaptive and open-ended phonology is created. The first experiment involves a rather abstract model of human speech, while the second experiment involves a (simplified) physical model. In both experiments the same selectionist algorithm was used. The first experiment was meant to test the basic idea of self-organisation and cultural evolution, while the second one was meant to test these ideas in a more complex and realistic setting. Both have shown that communicative success can increase while communicative complexity also increases. The implications of this for linguistics are discussed, as well as possible and necessary future research.