What is human language, how is it learned, and how did it evolve? We invite people who are interested in these questions to talk about their research. 

Katrin Schulz, Raquel Alhama, Fausto Carcassi, Marieke Schouwstra

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speaker: Marieke Woensdregt (RU Nijmegen)

title: The role of social cognition and social interaction in shaping language

location: PCH 4.04. We will offer this as a hybrid event; meeting Meeting ID: 869 9939 5665

abstract: 

In this talk, I will discuss the roles that social cognition (specifically: perspective-taking) and social interaction (specifically: asking for clarification) play in shaping language. On the role of social cognition, I will present experimental work in which we manipulated the possibility/difficulty of perspective-taking in a task where pairs of participants had to develop a novel communication system. Preliminary analyses suggest that when participants have access to each other’s perspectives (i.e., when the partner’s avatar is visible) they converge on a deictic system, which is also associated with higher communication accuracy. When the partner’s avatar is invisible, however, deictic systems break down and participants gravitate towards object labelling. These results suggest that the communicative context influences the emergence and functioning of different communicative systems through perspective-taking. On the role of social interaction, I will present computational modelling work that investigates how noise and other-initiated repair (i.e., asking for clarification) interact, through cultural evolution, with the structure of language. Earlier work has shown that compositional structure can arise under the combined pressures of (i) learnability and (ii) expressivity. Here we connect these results to two other ubiquitous features of human communication: noise and interactive repair. We find that even in the absence of a learnability pressure, compositional languages are favoured somewhat under the combined pressures of (i) mutual understanding and (ii) minimal effort, because compositional structure allows for efficient other-initiated repair.

speaker: Dan Dediu (UB Barcelona)

title: Linguistic diversity: from weak individual biases to large-scale structural differences between languages

location: PCH 5.37. We will offer this as a hybrid event; meeting ID: 842 6155 5885. 

abstract: It has become a platitude, but it is still worth repeating that the 7000 or so language currently used differ in many ways at basically every level ones cares to look at, but that this variation is patterned and resulting from a multitude of complex processes. In this talk I will try to argue that some of this variation is due to the amplification of (relatively weak) biases expressed at the level of the individual language learner and user, as language is repeatedly used and transmitted within and between groups and generations. The engine driving this amplification is represented by cultural evolutionary processes acting in structured communicative networks. I will present some examples of such such amplification arguably having taken place, with the amplified biases ranging from phonetic details due to minute variation in vocal tract anatomy, to the colour lexicon due to environmental effects on the physiology of the eye, passing through the complex origins of such biases in the interactions between our genes, environment and culture. Finally, I will briefly present some ongoing modelling and experimental work that tries to understand how communication in structured networks might explain this type of amplification.