ABSTRACT
Human sound systems are invariably phonemically coded, which means that there are parts of syllables that are re-used in other syllables. It is one of the most primitive compositional system in language. To explain this phenomenon, there existed so far three kinds of approaches: “Chomskyan” /cognitive innatism, morpho-perceptual innatism and the more recent approach of “language as a complex cultural system which adapts under the pressure of efficient communication”. We proposed in (Oudeyer 2002) a new hypothesis based on a low-level model of sensory-motor interactions, characterized by the absence of functional pressure and the use of very generic neural devices. This paper presents a unified model of the origins of syllable systems which does allow a comparison of the different hypothesis on the same ground. We show that our hypothesis is the only one to be sufficient, and that all others are not necesary. Moreover, the model we present the first that shows how a population of agents can build culturally a complex sound systems without the assumption that they already share a phonemic repertoire.
