Environmental constraints shaping constituent order in emerging communication systems: Structural iconicity, interactive alignment and conventionalization

Abstract

Where does linguistic structure come from? Recent gesture elicitation studies have indicated that constituent order (corresponding to for instance subject-verb-object, or SVO in English) may be heavily influenced by human cognitive biases constraining gesture production and transmission. Here we explore the alternative hypothesis that syntactic patterns are motivated by multiple environmental and social-interactional constraints that are external to the cognitive domain. In three experiments, we systematically investigate different motivations for structure in the gestural communication of simple transitive events. The first experiment indicates that, if participants communicate about different types of events, manipulation events (e.g. someone throwing a cake) and construction events (e.g. someone baking a cake), they spontaneously and systematically produce different constituent orders, SOV and SVO respectively, thus following the principle of structural iconicity. The second experiment shows that participants' choice of constituent order is also reliably influenced by social-interactional forces of interactive alignment, that is, the tendency to re-use an interlocutor's previous choice of constituent order, thus potentially overriding affordances for iconicity. Lastly, the third experiment finds that the relative frequency distribution of referent event types motivates the stabilization and conventionalization of a single constituent order for the communication of different types of events. Together, our results demonstrate that constituent order in emerging gestural communication systems is shaped and stabilized in response to multiple external environmental and social factors: structural iconicity, interactive alignment and distributional frequency.

Types of iconicity and combinatorial strategies distinguish semantic categories in silent gesture across cultures

“…While speakers have a strong bias to depict a concept through the re-enactment of human-object interactions, when the referent has limited action affordances people implement an alternative iconic form of representation (i.e., drawing). These data speak in favour of claims that the natural properties of a referent and their structural iconicity will shape the form and sequencing of silent gestures (Christensen et al, 2016).…”

Interaction Promotes the Adaptation of Referential Conventions to the Communicative Context

“…This type of shift cannot be explained by the effect of salience or alignment alone, and instead points toward an interaction between dialogical alignment and a dynamic adaptation to a changing context of use (Christensen, Fusaroli, & Tylén, ). In our experiment, the appropriateness or “fit” of a description scheme with respect to a specific maze layout generated an initial contextual pressure, but the repetition of the task made some schemas more efficient than others over time, creating an additional and competing pressure.…”

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

“…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).…”