Color categories enjoy a special status among human perceptual categories as they exhibit a remarkable cross-cultural similarity. Many scholars have explained this universal character as being the result of an innate representation or an innate developmental program which all humans share. We will critically assess the available evidence, which is at best controversial, and we will suggest an alternative account for the universality of color categories based on linguistic transmission constrained by universal biases. We introduce a computational model to test our hypothesis and present results. These show that indeed the cultural acquisition of color categories together with mild constraints on the perception and categorical representation result in categories that have a distribution similar to human color categories.

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Joris Bleys. 2015. Language strategies for the domain of colour (Computational Models of Language Evolution 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/51 © 2015, Joris Bleys Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: 978-3-946234-16-6 (Digital) 978-3-946234-17-3 (Hardcover) 978-3-944675-44-2 (Softcover) ISSN: 2364-7809Cover and concept of design: Storage and cataloguing done by FU BerlinLanguage Science Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first publication but Language Science Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter.

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Although most previous model-based research has not moved beyond first-order semantics, human languages are clearly capable of expressing second-order semantics: the meanings expressed in a sentence do not only consist of conjunctions of first-order predicates but also predicates that take other predicates as an argument. In this paper we report on multi-agent language game experiments in which agents handle second-order semantics. We focus our discussion on how this type of research is able to provide fundamental insights in how properties of humanlanguage-like properties could once have emerged. For recursion, this might have happened as a side-effect of agents trying to reuse previously learned language structure as much as possible.