this paper is an investigation of how recursive communication systems can come to be. In particular, the investigation explores the possibility that such a system could emerge among the members of a population as the result of a process I characterize as "negotiation," because each individual both contributes to, and conforms with, the system 1

this paper is on procedures whereby new (e.g., juvenile) members of a population could learn to communicate with the other members by observing their communicative behavior. Two apparently distinct issues are relevant to the evaluation of such learning procedures. First, the procedure must enable the new members to accurately acquire the communication system of the population, even though their observations may be limited, noisy, or otherwise misleading. Second, the learning procedure used by its new members will affect the population's communication system over time. The use of a particular procedure might result in the population's communication increasing in coordination, ultimately yielding a nearly optimally coordinated system. If a learning procedure were to satisfy both criteria, it could explain how learned communication systems are maintained over time, as well as how they are established in the first place.

The paper discusses efforts to understand the self-organisation and evolution of language from a cognitive modeling point of view. It focuses in particular on efforts that use connectionist components to synthesise some of the major stages in the emergence of language and possible transitions between stages. The paper does not introduce new technical results but discusses a number of dimensions for mapping out the research landscape. 1 1