A cross-model study on the effect of power-laws on language evolution

Abstract

Based on three evolutionary computational models that respectively simulate lexical, categorical and syntactic evolutions, we explore the effect of power-law distributed social popularity on language origin and change. Simulation results reveal a critical scaling degree (λ ≈ 1.0) in power-law distributions that helps accelerate the diffusion of linguistic conventions and preserve high linguistic understandability in population. Other scaling degrees (λ = 0.0 or λ > 1.0), however, tend to delay such diffusion process and affect linguistic understandability. Apart from the conventionalization nature of language communications in these models, increase in population size could also contribute to select the critical scaling degree, since this scaling degree can accommodate the influence of population size on linguistic understandability and many power-laws in real-world systems have their scaling degrees around this critical value.