Figure 1. Diagram of the Blending Game.

In each game a Speaker and a Hearer are chosen. The Speaker chooses a Topic and utters a name for it (i.e., it produces one or more meaningless forms, consisting of unique identifiers, e.g., , , etc.). If her inventory for the Topic is empty she invents a brand new word, i.e., a word never appeared in the whole population for all the possible objects. Alternatively, she chooses one of the existing word (the last-winning one). The hearer has to understand the uttered word and to relate it to an object on the basis of the content of her previously recorded information (her repertoire). The understanding phase is ruled by the parameter , a characteristic memory scale introduced through eq. 1. If the communication fails the Speaker adopts a blending repair strategy which consists in inventing a new word composed by reusing parts of already proposed words, preferably associated with object nearest neighbors of the chosen topic. In the example depicted, boyfriend is composed out of boyhood and girlfriend. If also after the adoption of the repair strategy the communication fails, the Hearer updates her inventory with the word just heard. If the game is a success, the inventories of both the Speaker and the Hearer for the Topic are cleared except for the successful word.