[alife] CFP: Adaptive Behavior: Special Issue on Language Acquisition and Evolution

[Paul Vogt]

Call for Papers: Language Acquisition and Evolution

Special Issue: Adaptive Behavior

Guest editor: Paul Vogt
Submission deadline: 15 November 2004
URL: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv/ab-cfp.html

It is widely believed that language has evolved through mutual 
interactive behaviour of individuals within an ecological niche, through 
individual adaptations and self-organisation. Humans communicate with 
each other about events that happen in their environment. When novel 
events occur, they might construct new internal representations of these 
events - either by learning from other's behaviour or by inventing new 
behaviour. They can then transmit this newly constructed knowledge to 
other humans. By subsequent local interactions between individuals, 
self-organisation can guide the emergence of a global structure called 
language as has repeatedly been shown by several computer models.


Many computational studies on the evolution of language have primarily 
focused on the idea that language is a complex dynamical adaptive 
system, as outlined above. Central to these studies is the cultural 
evolution of language, i.e. language is thought to have evolved based on 
cultural transmissions rather than on biological adaptations. Cultural 
transmission of language is impossible without the ability to learn 
language. This special issue is inspired by a recent Symposium on 
Language Evolution and Acquisition held at the 2004 Human Behavior & 
Evolution Society conference, and focuses on the relation between 
language origins, acquisition and evolution. Two main themes to be 
explored are how could language acquisition mechanisms have evolved, and 
the impact that particular acquisition skills may have had on the 
evolution of language itself.


/Adaptive Behavior/ solicits papers that present synthetic studies that 
explicitly focuses on the interface between language origins and/or 
evolution, and language acquisition. The models should involve either 
computer simulations or robotic platforms. However, those papers that 
integrate models with psychological, linguistic or biological data are 
particularly welcome. Papers in this special issue should not exceed the 
equivalent length of 10 journal pages. See the web-site of the Adaptive 
Behavior (http://www.isab.org.uk/journal/) for further instructions.


Topics include (though not restricted):

  * Evolution of
        o language acquisition skills.
        o joint attention.
        o corrective feedback.
  * Phonetics.
  * Lexicon formation.
  * Meaning inference.
  * Symbol grounding in language.
  * Emergence of syntax or grammar.
  * Language change.
  * Language diversity.

If you intend to submit a paper, please send a tentative title and 
abstract to the guest editor (Paul Vogt, paulv at ling.ed.ac.uk). (This 
would help to speed up the selection of reviewers.) If you are uncertain 
whether your paper would satisfy the topic of this special issue, or if 
you wish further information, please contact the guest editor too.


Important dates:

  * *15 November 2004: Submission deadline.*
  * 15 February 2005: Notification of acceptance.
  * 15 April 2005: Revised versions due.
  * 30 May 2005: Authors notified (for revised papers).
  * Late 2005: Special issue appears.

-- 
Dr. Paul Vogt, Research Fellow 
Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
University of Edinburgh
Phone: +44 (0)131 6503960
Fax: +44 (0)131 6503962
URL: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~paulv