Lecture on language evolution by Marieke Woensdregt - Friday @11, PCH 4.04

[Marieke Schouwstra]

Dear all,

This Friday 11:00-12:00, Marieke Woensdregt (RU Nijmegen) will give a talk in our Language Evolution and Learning Amsterdam series (see title and abstract below). Come and see the talk in person in PCH room 4.04, or join online on Zoom (meeting ID 869 9939 5665). 

We hope to see you all there! 

Kind regards,

Katrin Schulz, Raquel Alhama, Fausto Carcassi, Marieke Schouwstra

Info: https://sites.google.com/view/lela-amsterdam

Email list (sign up): https://groups.google.com/g/lelams/  

p.s. Our email list is still modest in size; if you think of anyone who might be interested in this talk, please forward this message!

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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.