Pantomimic communication: the problem non-conventionality vs. culture-specificity

Przemyslaw Żywiczynski & Sławomir Wacewicz, Centre for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland

A number of prominent language evolution researchers suggest that the emergence of language could have been preceded by a stage of pantomimic communication (e.g. Arbib 2012, Tomasello 2008). The assessment of pantomimic hypotheses largely depends on a multifaceted investigation of pantomime as a unique semiotic resource, since despite its non-linguistic character, it allows for communicating a wide spectrum of meanings (Zlatev et al. 2017). The proponents of pantomimic conceptions agree that a key characteristic of pantomime that makes it a viable candidate for a precursor of languages is its non-conventional character (Żywiczyński 2018). We investigate whether the non-conventionality of pantomime should lead to the assumption of its freedom from group-specificity – we summon lines of evidence present in gestural literature (e.g. Poggi & Zomparelli 1987; Kendon, 2004; Kita 2009; McNeill 2012), on language evolution, as well as present the results of a cross-cultural (Polish-Italian) study on understanding pantomimically communicated events.

The handing down of language

Casey Lister, University of Western Australia, Australia

How did language emerge within our species, and how did it evolve into the complex, primarily symbolic and largely vocal communication systems we use today? In this talk, I present a model of sign creation and change to explain how people bootstrap communication systems in the absence of a shared language. Next, I describe 8 experiments that were conducted to test this model; in each, modern human participants attempt to communicate meanings to a partner through gestures or non-lexical vocalizations. The experiments examine adult communication (experiments 1-3), child communication (experiments 4, 5) and communication with varying task difficulty (experiments 6-8). Across all experiments, my results support an account of language creation and evolution in which gesture plays an integral role.

The communicative potential of pantomimic re-enactments of events in trained and naive actors

Monika Boruta-Żywiczyńska, Marta Sibierska & Marek Placiński, Centre for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland

This pilot study, derivative of a larger project (OPUS14-2017/27/B/HS2/00642), tests the communicative potential of pantomimic re-enactments in two actors: with acting training (A-type) and without (B-type). A-type actors are expected to put in maximum effort in re-enactments; B-type actors - to aim at maximum communicativeness with minimum effort. To measure the “communicativeness” of the two strategies, the actors (A-type and B-type) are presented with a matrix of images (N=20) with a series of events and re-enact them in front of a camera. The recordings (n=20) are presented separately to two groups of guessers (55 participants each), whose task is to link them with the images from the matrix. The results serve as a basis for discussing the importance of the actors’ “background” in the context of pantomime as a major semiotic resource in early human communication (cf. Kendon 2011; McNeill 2012; Zlatev et al. 2017).

Natural word order: Coding only grammar

Marek Placiński, Monika Boruta-Żywiczyńska & Marta Sibierska, Centre for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland

This study is an extension of a larger research conducted by the authors of the proposal, which investigated order of events in pantomime. Earlier, we found that if reenactments are informationally salient, the order of events does not influence comprehension. In the extension of the study, we check whether coding only grammatical information (case, number, gender) plays a role in pantomime. The experiment involves one actor re-enacting 20 scenes in two conditions: (1) SVO (N=20) and (2) SOV (N=20), and coding only grammatical information. Afterwards, the recordings are presented to two groups of participants (n=40), whose task is to match the scene they are watching from either condition (1) or (2) with images on a matrix. As such, this research addresses the problem of linear grammar in evolution of language (Jackendoff & Wittenberg, 2017) and NWO (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2008; Hall et al., 2013; Gibson et al., 2013).

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