Luc Steels

Group website

Research Outline

The goal of our research is to develop a theory for the origins and evolution of language. Such a theory necessarily involves three aspects: social, cultural and biological. The social aspect should give us answers to the question “Why did humans start to talk?”. The cultural aspect looks to explain how new language forms arise in language and keep on changing over time. The biological aspect addresses how the biological foundations for language may have arisen. We focus mostly on the cultural aspect, developing and testing agent-based models to explain how features of language, such as agreement systems, arise and culturally evolve.

 

Research Lines

  • Origins and evolution of grammatical structures.

Although there is a lot of data about the historical change in language, there is virtually no theory of the fundamental processes underlying this kind of evolution. We try to understand the cognitive mechanisms, interaction patterns, and collective dynamics that could explain how grammatical structures arise in human language by building agent-based models.

  • Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG)

In order to conduct agent-based experiments in language evolution it is necessary to have a computational formalism that is capable of handling variation, flexibility and change. FCG has been released as open source and has a growing community of users (http://www.fcg-net.org/).

  • Neural implementations of Fluid Construction Grammar

To bridge the gap between computational models and neurobiology, we are investigating how a replicator dynamics model of the brain could potentially be used to implement the highly complex operations that Fluid Construction Grammar demands.

 

Team during 2017-18

  • PhD students: Emilia García-Casademont.
  • Technicians: Andrea Barquet.

 

Selected publications 2017-18

  • The evolutionary dynamics of language. Steels L, Szathmáry E (2017) Biosystems. 2018 Feb;164:128-137. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2017.11.003.
  • Steels L (2017) Human language is a culturally evolving system. Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Feb;24(1):190-193. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1086-6.