Abstract:Recent work on emerging sign languages provides evidence for how key properties of linguistic systems are created. Here we use laboratory experiments to investigate the contribution of two specific mechanismsinteraction and transmission-to the emergence of a manual communication system in silent gesturers. We show that the combined effects of these mechanisms, rather than either alone, lead to a gradual increase of regularity, systematic structure and communicative efficiency. The gestures initially produced b… Show more
“…In our study, gesturers, who lack a conventionalised manual lexicon, are also capable of making subtle semantic distinctions through the combination of gestures with different iconic modes of representation. Critically, this level of combinatorial patterning is in place at the first instance of spontaneous gestural production and without repeated iterations of cultural transmission, as has been reported in other studies (Micklos, 2016; Motamedi, Schouwstra, Culbertson, Smith, & Kirby, 2018). Fig.…”
a b st r a c tIn this study we explore whether different types of iconic gestures (i.e., acting, drawing, representing) and their combinations are used systematically to distinguish between different semantic categories in production and comprehension. In Study 1, we elicited silent gestures from Mexican and Dutch participants to represent concepts from three semantic categories: actions, manipulable objects, and non-manipulable objects. Both groups favoured the acting strategy to represent actions and manipulable objects; while non-manipulable objects were represented through the drawing strategy. Actions elicited primarily single gestures whereas objects elicited combinations of different types of iconic gestures as well as pointing. In Study 2, a different group of participants were shown gestures from Study 1 and were asked to guess their meaning. Single-gesture depictions for actions were more accurately guessed than for objects. Objects represented through two-gesture combinations (e.g., acting + drawing) were more accurately guessed than objects represented with a single gesture. We suggest iconicity is exploited to make direct links with a referent, but when it lends itself to ambiguity, individuals resort to combinatorial structures to clarify the intended referent. Iconicity and the need to communicate a clear signal shape the structure of silent gestures and this in turn supports comprehension. k e y w o r d s : silent gesture, iconicity, language emergence, combinatorial structure, emerging sign language.
“…In our study, gesturers, who lack a conventionalised manual lexicon, are also capable of making subtle semantic distinctions through the combination of gestures with different iconic modes of representation. Critically, this level of combinatorial patterning is in place at the first instance of spontaneous gestural production and without repeated iterations of cultural transmission, as has been reported in other studies (Micklos, 2016; Motamedi, Schouwstra, Culbertson, Smith, & Kirby, 2018). Fig.…”
a b st r a c tIn this study we explore whether different types of iconic gestures (i.e., acting, drawing, representing) and their combinations are used systematically to distinguish between different semantic categories in production and comprehension. In Study 1, we elicited silent gestures from Mexican and Dutch participants to represent concepts from three semantic categories: actions, manipulable objects, and non-manipulable objects. Both groups favoured the acting strategy to represent actions and manipulable objects; while non-manipulable objects were represented through the drawing strategy. Actions elicited primarily single gestures whereas objects elicited combinations of different types of iconic gestures as well as pointing. In Study 2, a different group of participants were shown gestures from Study 1 and were asked to guess their meaning. Single-gesture depictions for actions were more accurately guessed than for objects. Objects represented through two-gesture combinations (e.g., acting + drawing) were more accurately guessed than objects represented with a single gesture. We suggest iconicity is exploited to make direct links with a referent, but when it lends itself to ambiguity, individuals resort to combinatorial structures to clarify the intended referent. Iconicity and the need to communicate a clear signal shape the structure of silent gestures and this in turn supports comprehension. k e y w o r d s : silent gesture, iconicity, language emergence, combinatorial structure, emerging sign language.
“…Finally, there is one study we are aware of that combines improvisation, communicative interaction, and transmission to new learners, bringing together all three processes reviewed above. Motamedi et al (2019) focused on how participants use improvised silent gesture to communicate about sets of thematically related concepts (e.g. chef, frying pan; hairdresser, scissors), and how their gestures develop over time in interaction between pairs of participants and/or across generations of learners.…”
Section: Iterationmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The study directly compared a communication condition, in which participants communicate repeatedly about the same concepts using initially improvised gestures, to an iterated condition, in which the output of one communicating pair is transmitted to a new pair of participants, for multiple generations (following the setup in Kirby et al (2015), but with an improvised gesture starting-point). Motamedi et al (2019) showed that systematic functional markers (gestures that indicate the meaning class a concept belongs to, such as a 'point-to-self' gesture to denote a person for a concept like 'chef') are rare in improvised gesture, emerge to some extent in the communication condition, but become prevalent and systematic when communicative interaction was combined with iterated transmission to new generations of learners.…”
Section: Iterationmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Silent gesture experiments, in which naïve participants convey information using only gesture and no speech, investigate the biases that play a role in improvisation situations (Goldin-Meadow, So,Özyürek, & Mylander, 2008;Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014;Gibson et al, 2013;Hall, Mayberry, & Ferreira, 2013;Schembri, Jones, & Burnham, 2005). We can combine silent gesture with mechanisms for interaction and iterated learning to investigate how the products of improvisation change over time, to investigate how individuals improvise solutions to communicative challenges, how pairs of individuals create conventions through interaction, and how these conventions are transmitted over time through iterated learning (Motamedi, Schouwstra, Smith, Culbertson, & Kirby, 2019). Below, we will describe each of these mechanisms (improvisation, interaction and iteration) in more detail, and discuss how we expect they act on the emergence of word order regimes in a series of silent gesture experiments.…”
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.
“…By using the term 'artificial sign language' we do not intend to suggest that the necessarily simplified system of gestures we test in our experiment are comparable to the full complexity of natural signed languages. Instead, we use the term to indicate that our methodology is an extension of artificial language learning paradigms (see Motamedi, Schouwstra, Smith, Culbertson, & Kirby, 2019). That is, our stimuli represent a necessarily simplified system, aiming to isolate the particular properties we are interested in, and we hope that the result is language-like in relevant and informative ways.…”
Recent work suggests that not all aspects of learning benefit from an iconicity advantage (Ortega, 2017). We present the results of an artificial sign language learning experiment testing the hypothesis that iconicity may help learners to learn mappings between forms and meanings, whilst having a negative impact on learning specific features of the form. We used a 3D camera (Microsoft Kinect) to capture participants’ gestures and quantify the accuracy with which they reproduce the target gestures in two conditions. In the iconic condition, participants were shown an artificial sign language consisting of congruent gesture–meaning pairs. In the arbitrary condition, the language consisted of non-congruent gesture–meaning pairs. We quantified the accuracy of participants’ gestures using dynamic time warping (Celebi et. al., 2013). Our results show that participants in the iconic condition learn mappings more successfully than participants in the arbitrary condition, but there is no difference in the accuracy with which participants reproduce the forms. While our work confirms that iconicity helps to establish form–meaning mappings, our study did not give conclusive evidence about the effect of iconicity on production; we suggest that iconicity may only have an impact on learning forms when these are complex.
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