Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We introduce a model of emergent communication between agents involved in signalling games inspired by early caregiver--child interactions. In the model, the child agent has to communicate its dynamically changing needs to the caregiver agent, which is able to address them. We demonstrate that the dialogical strategy performs better than one-directional communication. When the child's signalling frequency is limited, a particular structure of signals and actions emerges that separates the child's needs into urgent and quiet. The meaning of emerging communication is better understood in pragmatic terms than in terms of mapping. Our model underscores the relationship between the dynamics of the environment and the dynamics of communication as one of the factors driving the language structure.