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

Schouwstra, Marieke; Swart, H.E. de; Thompson, Bill

doi:10.1111/cogs.12732

Cited by 14 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Each condition had a majority order for each event, shown in 7 out of the 10 training trials for that event. In the natural condition, the majority order reflected the natural semanticallyconditioned ordering preference found in experiments 1a and 1b and in previous work (Schouwstra et al, 2019;Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014), such that participants saw a majority order of SOV for the extensional event and SVO for the intensional event. In the unnatural condition, the majority order was the inverse of the natural condition, seeing a majority order of SVO for the extensional event and SOV for the intensional event.…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 69%

From improvisation to learning: how naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution

Motamedi¹,

Wolters²,

Naegeli³

et al. 2021

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Silent gesture studies, in which hearing participants from different linguistic backgrounds produce gestures to communicate events, have been used to test hypotheses about the cognitive biases that govern cross-linguistic word order preferences. In particular, the differential use of SOV and SVO order to communicate, respectively, extensional events (where the direct object exists independently of the event; e.g., girl throws ball) and intensional events (where the meaning of the direct object is potentially dependent on the verb; e.g., girl thinks of ball), has been suggested to represent a natural preference, demonstrated in improvisation contexts. However, natural languages tend to prefer systematic word orders, where a single order is used regardless of the event being communicated. We present a series of studies that investigate ordering preferences for SOV and SVO orders using an online forced-choice experiment, where participants select orders for different events i) in the absence of conventions and ii) after learning event-order mappings in different frequencies in a regularisation experiment. Our results show that natural ordering preferences arise in the absence of conventions, replicating previous findings from production experiments. In addition, we show that participants regularise the input they learn in the manual modality in two ways, such that, while the preference for systematic order patterns increases through learning, it exists in competition with the natural ordering preference, that conditions order on the semantics of the event. Using our experimental data in a computational model of cultural transmission, we show that this pattern is expected to persist over generations, suggesting that we should expect to see evidence of semantically-conditioned word order variability in at least some languages.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 69%

From improvisation to learning: how naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution

Motamedi¹,

Wolters²,

Naegeli³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…When people are engaged in silent gesture, and improvise in the absence of a conventional language system, they use semantic cues to structure their utterances, and they will use utterance structure to obtain different semantic interpretations. This semantically conditioned word order regime can be seen as natural word order behaviour, and is rooted in cognitive biases (Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014;Schouwstra et al, 2019), and conventional ordering rooted in the extensional/intensional distinction has not been observed in any existing languages. 7 However, although improvisation occurs in established languages, these languages are crucially different from silent gesture: they are used for communicative interaction and persist through cultural transmission.…”

Section: Summary and Planmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…There is also experimental evidence that suggests that production biases are mirrored in interpretation of silent gesture. In an experiment with SOV and SVO ordered silent gesture strings with ambiguous action gestures, Schouwstra, de Swart, and Thompson (2019) found that participants use constituent order as a cue to distinguish between intensional and extensional events. Participants were more likely to interpret SVO ordered gesture strings (than SOV ordered strings) as intensional events, but the strength of the effect was much less pronounced than for production.…”

Section: Improvisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Creation events are a sub-class of intensional events(Schouwstra, 2012).3 Schouwstra (2017) mainly focuses on word order preferences for complex events in which temporal information is included, but the study replicates the word order effects for intensional and extensional events.4 Contrasting results were found byHall, Ahn, et al (2015), who report that when participants interpret gesture strings of reversible and irreversible event in different orders, their preferences differ from those in production. SeeSchouwstra et al (2019) for a detailed discussion of the different findings.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Schouwstra¹,

Smith²,

Kirby³

2020

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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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“…What we are stressing here is that there is evidence revealing that gesture has a greater potential for ‘bootstrapping’ a communication system than non-linguistic vocalization (e.g. [66,67]). That said, pantomime would certainly have gradually included vocalizations [47], which would have the effect of enhancing the overall message (as we will argue below, vocal communication evolved for complex syntax that, in turn, developed to facilitate persuasive communication).…”

Section: Persuasion Narrative and Pantomimic Communication In Archaic Homininsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Persuasive conversation as a new form of communication inHomo sapiens

Ferretti

Adornetti

2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The aim of this paper is twofold: to propose that conversation is the distinctive feature of Homo sapiens ' communication; and to show that the emergence of modern language is tied to the transition from pantomime to verbal and grammatically complex forms of narrative. It is suggested that (animal and human) communication is a form of persuasion and that storytelling was the best tool developed by humans to convince others. In the early stage of communication, archaic hominins used forms of pantomimic storytelling to persuade others. Although pantomime is a powerful tool for persuasive communication , it is proposed that it is not an effective tool for persuasive conversation : conversation is characterized by a form of reciprocal persuasion among peers; instead, pantomime has a mainly asymmetrical character. The selective pressure towards persuasive reciprocity of the conversational level is the evolutionary reason that allowed the transition from pantomime to grammatically complex codes in H. sapiens , which favoured the evolution of speech. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

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

Cited by 14 publications

References 41 publications

From improvisation to learning: how naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution

From improvisation to learning: how naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution

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

Persuasive conversation as a new form of communication inHomo sapiens

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