The emergence and evolution of linguistic structure: from lexical to grammatical communication systems

In this paper, efforts to understand the self-organization and evolution of language from a cognitive modelling point of view are discussed. In particular, the paper focuses on efforts that use connectionist components to synthesize some of the major stages in the emergence of language and possible transitions between stages. New technical results are not introduced, but some dimensions for mapping out the research landscape are discussed.This research was partly supported by the ECAgents project funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies programme (IST-FET) of the European Commission under the EU RD contract IST-1940Peer Reviewe