Abstract
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A computational model has recently shown how this could be the case, focusing on the paradigmatic example of the universal properties of colour naming patterns, and producing results in quantitative agreement with the experimental data. Here we investigate the role of an individual perceptual bias in the framework of the model. We study how, and to what extent, the structure of the bias influences the corresponding linguistic universal patterns. We show that the cultural history of a group of speakers introduces population-specific constraints that act against the pressure for uniformity arising from the individual bias, and we clarify the interplay between these two forces.
Highlights
Language universals and colour namingDifferent languages share a collection of structural properties, which are said to be universal[1]
We check to what extent the very good agreement between the outcome of the model and the World Color Survey (WCS) data can be related to the specific structure of the human Just Noticeable Difference (JND)
We compare the categorisations of different simulated populations, and we measure the dispersion of their colour naming patterns in order to study the interplay between the bias and the stochasticity introduced by the underlying cultural process
Summary
Different languages share a collection of structural properties, which are said to be universal[1]. Every individual is endowed with a set of grammatical principles, defining a Universal Grammar, that are found to be shared across all human languages. This view has been questioned in various ways (see, for example, [6]), and different computational approaches have shown that the hypothesis of a language-specific genetic endowment would result in a series of paradoxes [7], while cultural transmission introduces informational bottlenecks that favour the emergence of regularities [8, 9]. A systematic analysis has shed new light on the very concept of universality
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