Ruixuan Deng, Xiaoyang Hu, Miles Gilberti, Shane Storks, Aman Taxali, Mike Angstadt, Chandra Sripada, Joyce Chai. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Emergent communication (EmCom) with deep neural network-based agents promises to yield insights into the nature of human language, but remains focused primarily on a few subfieldspecific goals and metrics that prioritize communication schemes which represent attributes with unique characters one-to-one and compose them syntactically.We thus reinterpret a common EmCom setting, the attribute-value reconstruction game, by imposing a smallvocabulary constraint to simulate double articulation, and formulating a novel setting analogous to naturalistic inflectional morphology (enabling meaningful comparison to natural language communication schemes).We develop new metrics and explore variations of this game motivated by real properties of inflectional morphology: concatenativity and fusion.Through our experiments, we discover that simulated phonological constraints encourage concatenative morphology, and emergent languages replicate the tendency of natural languages to fuse grammatical attributes.