Emergent CV-Syllables

This report describes a system in which a population of agents develops a set of syllables for imitating each other. Initially, the agents do not have a repertoire of sounds. However, they are able to produce a range of human like syllables that consist of an onset (consonant) and a nucleus (vowel). Through a pressure to imitate each other successfully and a pressure to increase the number of sounds they are using, the agents develop a consistent set of syllables. The agents imitate each other in encounters that are called imitation games. In these imitation games one agent utters a sound, which another agent then tries to imitate. Participants of these imitation games are chosen randomly from the population. The imitation games are iterated a large number of times. The resulting syllable systems are found to be coded phonetically, instead of holistically. This means that a much smaller number of onsets and nuclei are used than there are syllables. The syllables can thus be analysed as consisting of a much smaller set of phonemes. However, these phonemes are not the ones one would expect in human language. This is most probably due to the settings of the many articulatory and perceptual parameters in the system that cause it to be insufficiently like the human articulatory and perceptual systems.