Evolution of conventional communication. A cross-cultural study of pantomimic re-enactments of transitive events

Żywiczyński, Przemysław; Sibierska, Marta; Wacewicz, Sławomir; Weijer, Joost van de; Ferretti, Francesco; Adornetti, Ines; Chiera, Alessandra; Deriu, Valentina

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2021.07.002

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 73 publications

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“…On a more general plane, a study by Hsieh et al (2014) investigates how "iconic movements", connected with stereotypical representation of certain concepts, determine successful communication in the game of charades (which has been used as the design basis for several studies on pantomime, see e.g. Zlatev et al, 2017;Żywiczyński et al, 2021a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s in a mime?

Sibierska

Boruta-Żywiczyńska

Żywiczyński

et al. 2022

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Several lines of research within developmental psychology, experimental semiotics and language origins studies have recently converged in their interest in pantomime as a system of bodily communication distinct from both language (spoken or signed) and nonlinguistic gesticulation. These approaches underscore the effectiveness of pantomime, which despite lack of semiotic conventions is capable of communicating complex meanings. However, very little research is available on the structural underpinnings of this effectiveness, that is, the specific properties of pantomime that determine its communicative success. To help fill in this gap, we conducted an exploratory rating study aimed at identifying those properties of pantomime that facilitate its understanding. We analysed an existing corpus of 602 recordings of whole-body re-enactments of short transitive events, coding each of them for 6 properties, and found out that the presence of salient elements (conspicuous objects in a specific semantic space), image mapping (representing the physical orientation of the object), and gender markers (distinguishing between the represented characters) increased the guessability of pantomimes.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s in a mime?

Sibierska

Boruta-Żywiczyńska

Żywiczyński

et al. 2022

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Defining Communication and Language from Within a Pluralistic Evolutionary Worldview

Gontier

2022

Topoi

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New definitions are proposed for communication and language. Communication is defined as the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange. Language is defined as community communication whereby the information exchanged comprises evolving individual and group-constructed knowledge and beliefs, that are enacted, narrated, or otherwise conveyed by evolving rule-governed and meaningful symbol systems, that are grounded, interpreted, and used from within evolving embodied, cognitive, ecological, sociocultural, and technological niches. These definitions place emphasis on the evolutionary aspects of communication and language, and they are here differentiated from four older paradigms that instead focus either on the referential or social aspects of language, or the informational or semantic aspects of communication. In contrast with these paradigms, the definitions proposed here for communication and language are in line with a pluralistic evolutionary worldview, one that necessitates the recognition that a multitude of units, levels, mechanisms and processes are involved in bringing forth communication and language.

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Experimental Semiotics: A Systematic Categorization of Experimental Studies on the Bootstrapping of Communication Systems

et al. 2023

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Experimental Semiotics (ES) is the study of novel forms of communication that communicators develop in laboratory tasks whose designs prevent them from using language. Thus, ES relates to pragmatics in a “pure,” radical sense, capturing the process of creating the relation between signs and their interpreters as biological, psychological, and social agents. Since such a creation of meaning-making from scratch is of central importance to language evolution research, ES has become the most prolific experimental approach in this field of research. In our paper, we report the results of a study on the scope of recent ES and evaluate the ways in which it is relevant to the study of language origins. We coded for multiple levels across 13 dimensions related to the properties of the emergent communication systems or properties of the study designs, such as type of goal (coordination versus referential), modality of communication, absence or presence of turn-taking, or the presence of vertical vs. horizontal transmission. We discuss our findings and our classification, focusing on the advantages and limitations of those trends in ES, and in particular their ecological validity in the context of bootstrapping communication and the evolution of language.

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Evolution of conventional communication. A cross-cultural study of pantomimic re-enactments of transitive events

Cited by 9 publications

References 73 publications

What’s in a mime?

What’s in a mime?

Defining Communication and Language from Within a Pluralistic Evolutionary Worldview

Experimental Semiotics: A Systematic Categorization of Experimental Studies on the Bootstrapping of Communication Systems

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