A Cognitively Founded Model of the Social Emergence of Lexicon

This paper suggests a model of the process through which a set of symbols, initially without any intrinsic meaning, acquires endogenously a conventional and socially shared meaning. This model has two related aspects. The first is the cognitive aspect, represented by the process through which each agent processes the information gathered during the interactions with other agents. In this paper, the agents are endowed with the cognitive skills necessary to categorize the input in a lexicographic way, a categorization process that is implemented by the means of data mining techniques. The second aspect is the social one, represented by the process of reiterate interactions among the agents who compose a population. The framework of this social process is that of evolutionary game theory, with a population of agents who are randomly matched in each period in order to play a game that, in this paper, is a kind of signaling game. The simulations show that the emergence of a socially shared meaning associated to a combination of symbols is, under the assumptions of this model, a statistically inevitable occurrence.