Figure 1.
An osmosis-like process for horizontal language transmission used in our model. The two halves of the diagram show the internal language representations of two individuals as bags of words. The figure shows how an individual in our framework copies and stores a word from their conversation partner; an instance of word A is incorporated, replacing an instance of word C. The number of instances of a particular word defines how likely someone is to use the word in a given situation. In our model of this process, each bag contains s words; user i sends words to user j at a rate rij and the recipient replaces a randomly chosen word in their bag with a received word with incorporation rate α. Since the likelihood of a word being replaced depends on its frequency in the bag, word frequencies change similarly to osmosis in that over time the frequencies of words in both halves will tend to equilibrate.