Exploring the Effect of Power Law Social Popularity on
Language Evolution
Artificial Life, 20 (3):
385--408 (July 2014)DOI: 10.1162/artl_a_00138
Abstract
Abstract We evaluate the effect of a
power-law-distributed social popularity on the origin
and change of language, based on three artificial life
models meticulously tracing the evolution of linguistic
conventions including lexical items, categories, and
simple syntax. A cross-model analysis reveals an
optimal social popularity, in which the E value of the
power law distribution is around 1.0. Under this
scaling, linguistic conventions can efficiently emerge
and widely diffuse among individuals, thus maintaining
a useful level of mutual understandability even in a
big population. From an evolutionary perspective, we
regard this social optimality as a tradeoff among
social scaling, mutual understandability, and
population growth. Empirical evidence confirms that
such optimal power laws exist in many large-scale
social systems that are constructed primarily via
language-related interactions. This study contributes
to the empirical explorations and theoretical
discussions of the evolutionary relations between
ubiquitous power laws in social systems and relevant
individual behaviors.
