THE ROLE OF THE NAMING GAME IN SOCIAL STRUCTURE

This paper presents a simulation study to explore the role of the naming game in social structure, which is nearly neglected by contemporary studies from statistical physics that mainly discuss the dynamics of language games in predefined mean-field or complex networks. Our foci include the dynamics of the naming game under a simple distance restriction, and the origin and evolution of primitive social clusters as well as their languages under this restriction. This study extends the current work on the role of social structure in language games, and provides better understanding on the self-organizing process of lexical conventionalization during cultural transmission. 1