  This work attempts to give new theoretical insights to the absence of
intermediate stages in the evolution of language. In particular, it is
developed an automata networks approach to a crucial question: how a population
of language users can reach agreement on a linguistic convention? To describe
the appearance of sharp transitions in the self-organization of language, it is
adopted an extremely simple model of (working) memory. At each time step,
language users simply loss part of their word-memories. Through computer
simulations of low-dimensional lattices, it appear sharp transitions at
critical values that depend on the size of the vicinities of the individuals.
