The emergence of phonological dispersion through interaction: an exploratory secondary analysis of a communicative game

Frontiers in Psychology

Psychology

Robin Clark¹  Gareth Roberts² 

[1] Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States;null;

关键词: cultural evolution;    phonology;    combinatoriality;    emergence of structure;    language;    communication;    experiment;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1130837

 received in 2022-12-23, accepted in 2023-05-04,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

IntroductionWhy is it that phonologies exhibit greater dispersion than we might expect by chance? In earlier work we investigated this using a non-linguistic communication game in which pairs of participants sent each other series of colors to communicate a set of animal silhouettes. They found that above-chance levels of dispersion, similar to that seen in vowel systems, emerged as a result of the production and perception demands acting on the participants. However, they did not investigate the process by which this dispersion came about.MethodTo investigate this we conducted a secondary statistical analysis of the data, looking in particular at how participants approached the communication task, how dispersion emerged, and what convergence looked like.ResultsWe found that dispersion was not planned from the start but emerged as a large-scale consequence of smaller-scale choices and adjustments. In particular, participants learned to reproduce colors more reliably over time, paid attention to signaling success, and shifted towards more extreme areas of the space over time.ConclusionThis study sheds light on the role of interactive processes in mediating between human minds and the emergence or larger-scale structure, as well as the distribution of features across the world's languages.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Roberts and Clark.