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Languages adapt to their contextual niche

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2014

JAMES WINTERS ,
SIMON KIRBY  and
KENNY SMITH
JAMES WINTERS*
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
SIMON KIRBY
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
KENNY SMITH
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
*
†Address for correspondence: e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

It is well established that context plays a fundamental role in how we learn and use language. Here we explore how context links short-term language use with the long-term emergence of different types of language system. Using an iterated learning model of cultural transmission, the current study experimentally investigates the role of the communicative situation in which an utterance is produced (situational context) and how it influences the emergence of three types of linguistic systems: underspecified languages (where only some dimensions of meaning are encoded linguistically), holistic systems (lacking systematic structure), and systematic languages (consisting of compound signals encoding both category-level and individuating dimensions of meaning). To do this, we set up a discrimination task in a communication game and manipulated whether the feature dimension shape was relevant or not in discriminating between two referents. The experimental languages gradually evolved to encode information relevant to the task of achieving communicative success, given the situational context in which they are learned and used, resulting in the emergence of different linguistic systems. These results suggest language systems adapt to their contextual niche over iterated learning.

Keywords

cultural transmissioniterated learninglanguage evolutioncontextcommunication games
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 415 - 449
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Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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