The emergence of systematic argument distinctions in artificial sign languages

Motamedi, Yasamin; Smith, Kenny; Schouwstra, Marieke; Culbertson, Jennifer; Kirby, Simon

doi:10.31234/osf.io/p6zy4

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…In natural interactive situations, they are always combined, and often even done at the same time (Pickering & Garrod, 2013). A logical next step is to extend the silent gesture paradigm to include communication (Christensen, Fusaroli, & Tyl en, 2016) and cultural transmission through artificial generations of lab participants (Motamedi, Schouwstra, Smith, Culbertson, & Kirby, 2018;Schouwstra, Smith, & Kirby, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting Silent Gesture: Cognitive Biases and Rational Inference in Emerging Language Systems

2019

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Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent‐ordering patterns to indicate “who did what to whom,” yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language conventions, revealing apparent biases underpinning word order usage, based on the semantic properties of the information to be conveyed. We extend the scope of these studies by focusing, experimentally and computationally, on the interpretation of silent gesture. We show cross‐linguistic experimental evidence that people use variability in constituent order as a cue to obtain different interpretations. To illuminate the computational principles that govern interpretation of non‐conventional communication, we derive a Bayesian model of interpretation via biased inductive inference and estimate these biases from the experimental data. Our analyses suggest people's interpretations balance the ambiguity that is characteristic of emerging language systems, with ordering preferences that are skewed and asymmetric, but defeasible.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting Silent Gesture: Cognitive Biases and Rational Inference in Emerging Language Systems

2019

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“…Participants confronted with a novel graphical communication task, where they must use drawings to convey concepts, initially produce complex and iconic drawings; however, over the course of interaction in pairs or groups those drawings become less complex, less iconic, and communicatively more successful (Garrod, Fay, Lee, Oberlander, & MacLeod, 2007;Fay, Garrod, Roberts, & Swoboda, 2010); sets of such drawings develop systematicity, such that drawings come to be composed of combinations of increasingly arbitrary sub-parts (Theisen, Oberlander, & Kirby, 2010). In a similar vein, recent work has implemented silent gesture in an interactive setting, to investigate how multiple participants improvise and then negotiate a manual communication system together (Motamedi, Schouwstra, & Kirby, 2017;Christensen et al, 2016;Schouwstra, Smith, & Kirby, 2016;Motamedi, Schouwstra, Smith, Culbertson, & Kirby, 2018). 6 For instance, Nölle, Staib, Fusaroli, and Tylén (2018) found that systematicity develops rapidly in interaction sets of improvised communicative gestures, particularly when communication was 'displaced' (communication about items that are not immediately present in the moment of communication).…”

Section: Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emergence of word order conventions: improvisation, interaction and transmission

Schouwstra¹,

Smith²,

Kirby³

2020

Preprint

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When people improvise to convey information by using only gesture and no speech (‘silent gesture’), they show language-independent word order preferences: SOV for extensional events (e.g., boy-ball-throw), but SVO for intensional events (e.g., boy-search-ball). Real languages tend not to condition word order on this kind of semantic distinction but instead use the same order irrespective of event type. Word order therefore exemplifies a contrast between naturalness in improvisation and conventionalised regularity in linguistic systems. We present an experimental paradigm in which initially-improvised silent gesture is both used for communication and culturally transmitted through artificial generations of lab participants. In experiments 1 and 2 we investigate the respective contributions of communicative interaction and cultural transmission on natural word order behaviour. We show that both interaction and iterated learning lead to a simplification of the word order regime, and the way in which this unfolds over time is surprisingly similar under the two mechanisms. The resulting dominant word order is mostly SVO, the order of the native language of our participants. In experiment 3, we manipulate the frequency of different semantic event types, and show that this can allow SOV order, rather than SVO order, to conventionalise. Taken together, our experiments demonstrate that where pressures for naturalness and regularity are in conflict, naturalness will give way to regularity as word order becomes conventionalised through repeated usage.

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“…In natural interactive situations, they are always combined, and often even done at the same time (Pickering & Garrod, 2013). A logical next step is to extend the silent gesture paradigm to include communication (Christensen, Fusaroli, & Tylén, 2016) and cultural transmission through artificial generations of lab participants (Motamedi, Schouwstra, Smith, Culbertson, & Kirby, 2018;Schouwstra, Smith, & Kirby, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreting Silent Gesture: cognitive biases and rational inference in emerging language systems

Schouwstra¹,

Swart²,

Thompson³

2018

Preprint

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Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent-ordering patterns to indicate ‘who did what to whom’, yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language conventions, revealing apparent biases underpinning word order usage, based on the semantic properties of the information to be conveyed. We extend the scope of these studies by focusing, experimentally and computationally, on the interpretation of silent gesture. We show cross-linguistic experimental evidence that people use variability in constituent order as a cue to obtain different interpretations. To illuminate the computational principles that govern interpretation of non-conventional communication, we derive a Bayesian model of interpretation via biased inductive inference, and estimate these biases from the experimental data. Our analyses suggest people’s interpretations balance the ambiguity that is characteristic of emerging language systems, with ordering preferences that are skewed and asymmetric, but defeasible.

show abstract

The emergence of systematic argument distinctions in artificial sign languages

Cited by 9 publications

References 50 publications

Interpreting Silent Gesture: Cognitive Biases and Rational Inference in Emerging Language Systems

Interpreting Silent Gesture: Cognitive Biases and Rational Inference in Emerging Language Systems

The emergence of word order conventions: improvisation, interaction and transmission

Interpreting Silent Gesture: cognitive biases and rational inference in emerging language systems

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