The acceleration of language evolution process based on a shift from material to information aspects of shared resources by communication

Abstract

We aimed to understand how a shift from material to informational aspects of shared resources, which corresponds to a shift from ancestral to modern human societies, can accelerate the coevolutionary process of cognitive and communicative linguistic abilities of human-kind. For this aim, we extended our integrated model of gene-culture coevolution of language by incorporating the resource finiteness (e.g., high: limited food resources; low: always beneficial knowledge) into resource sharing processes based on cognitive and communicative abilities of individuals in a two-dimensional linguistic space in which both languages and individual abilities are allowed to evolve. Using the extended model, we made and compared computer simulations with different settings of the resource finiteness. The result showed that the decrease in the resource finiteness can increase the adaptive evolution of languages via the acceleration of the cyclic coevolution process of the linguistic abilities for individuals and languages due to the decrease in the linguistic diversity.