Subsequently Kirby tried a variety of different models and gave them different kinds of data, but he found that “the cumulative accretion of linguistic structure seemed to always happen no matter how we built the models.”
The changes might be very tiny, Kirby notes, but over the generations “the process snowballs.” Excitingly, not only did the agents' language begin to look more and more structured after many generations, the kind of structure that emerged looked like a simple version of that which occurs in natural human language. Subsequently Kirby tried a variety of different models and gave them different kinds of data, but he found that “the cumulative accretion of linguistic structure seemed to always happen no matter how we built the models.” It was the crucible of learning over and over again that created the language itself.