The role of figurative languages such as metaphor and metonymy in creativity has been studied in cognitive linguistics. These methods can also be applied to analyze non-linguistic data such as pictures and gestures. In this paper we analyze fashion design by focusing on visual metaphor and metonymy. The nature of creativity in fashion design is not fully studied from a cognitive perspective compared to other related fields such as art. We especially focus on the aspect of fashion design as a (...) communication tool between the designer and the audience to convey designer’s image of human. Photos from two fashion shows are analyzed. We carried out an experiment to compare how human images in two shows are interpreted by those who are familiar with fashion and those who are not. We got three results: (1) As far as figurative (metaphorical and metonymic) interpretations of human image are concerned, two groups with different familiarity to fashion have significantly different patterns of responses to two shows. (2) For non-figurative interpretations (such as physical or personal attributes), no significant difference in the pattern of response to the show was observed between two groups. The participants as a whole, however, responded to the two shows differently. (3) In addition for non-figurative interpretation, fashion experts found significantly more attributes in human images than the others. The results show that the analysis of figurative interpreations is effective in seeing how the familiarity to fashion affects the mode of seeing fashion shows. (shrink)

Production and comprehension have long been viewed as inseparable components of language. The study of vision, by contrast, has centered almost exclusively on comprehension. Here we investigate drawing—the most basic form of visual production. How do we convey concepts in visual form, and how does refining this skill, in turn, affect recognition? We developed an online platform for collecting large amounts of drawing and recognition data, and applied a deep convolutional neural network model of visual cortex trained only on natural (...) images to explore the hypothesis that drawing recruits the same abstract feature representations that support natural visual object recognition. Consistent with this hypothesis, higher layers of this model captured the abstract features of both drawings and natural images most important for recognition, and people learning to produce more recognizable drawings of objects exhibited enhanced recognition of those objects. These findings could explain why drawing is so effective for communicating visual concepts, they suggest novel approaches for evaluating and refining conceptual knowledge, and they highlight the potential of deep networks for understanding human learning. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)

Artificial language learning experiments have become an important tool in exploring principles of language and language learning. A persistent question in all of this work, however, is whether ALL engages the linguistic system and whether ALL studies are ecologically valid assessments of natural language ability. In the present study, we considered these questions by examining the relationship between performance in an ALL task and second language learning ability. Participants enrolled in a Spanish language class were evaluated using a number of (...) different measures of Spanish ability and classroom performance, which was compared to IQ and a number of different measures of ALL performance. The results show that success in ALL experiments, particularly more complex artificial languages, correlates positively with indices of L2 learning even after controlling for IQ. These findings provide a key link between studies involving ALL and our understanding of second language learning in the classroom. (shrink)

This article explains how people synchronize their thoughts through empathetic relationships and points out the elementary neuronal mechanisms orchestrating this process. The many dimensions of empathy are discussed, as is the manner by which empathy affects health and disorders. A case study of teaching children empathy, with positive results, is presented. Mirror neurons, the recently discovered mechanism underlying empathy, are characterized, followed by a theory of brain-to-brain coupling. This neuro-tuning, seen as a kind of synchronization between brains and between individuals, (...) takes various forms, including frequency aspects of language use and the understanding that develops regardless of the difference in spoken tongues. Going beyond individual-to-individual empathy and SYNC, the article explores the phenomenon of synchronization in groups and points out how synchronization increases group cooperation and performance. (shrink)

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

Communication is a fundamentally interactive phenomenon. Evolutionary biology recognises this fact in its definition of communication, in which signals are those actions that cause reactions, and where both action and reaction are designed for that reason. Where only one or the other is designed then the behaviours are classed as either cues or coercion. Since mutually dependent behaviours are unlikely to emerge simultaneously, the symmetry inherent in these definitions gives rise to a prediction that communication will only emerge if cues (...) or coercive behaviours do so first. They will then be co-opted for communication. A range of case studies, from animal signalling, evolutionary robotics, comparative psychology, and evolutionary linguistics are used to test this prediction. The first three are found to be supportive. However in the Embodied Communication Game, a recent experimental approach to the emergence of communication between adult humans, communication emerges even when cues or coerced behaviours are not possible. This suggests that humans are exceptional in this regard. It is argued that the reason for this is the degree to which we are able and compelled to read and interpret the behaviour of others in intentional terms. (shrink)

A growing conceptual and empirical literature is advancing the idea that language extends our cognitive skills. One of the most influential positions holds that language – qua material symbols – facilitates individual thought processes by virtue of its material properties (Clark, 2006a). Extending upon this model, we argue that language enhances our cognitive capabilities in a much more radical way: the skilful engagement of public material symbols facilitates evolutionarily unprecedented modes of collective perception, action and reasoning (interpersonal synergies) creating dialogically (...) extended minds. We relate our approach to other ideas about collective minds ( Gallagher, 2011, Theiner et al., 2010 and Tollefsen, 2006) and review a number of empirical studies to identify the mechanisms enabling the constitution of interpersonal cognitive systems. (shrink)

Collaborators generally coordinate their activities through communication, during which they readily negotiate a shared lexicon for activity-related objects. This social-pragmatic activity both recruits and affects cognitive and social-cognitive processes ranging from selective attention to perspective taking. We ask whether negotiating reference also facilitates category learning or might private verbalization yield comparable facilitation? Participants in three referential conditions learned to classify imaginary creatures according to combinations of functional features—nutritive and destructive—that implicitly defined four categories. Remote partners communicated in the Dialogue condition. (...) In the Monologue condition, participants recorded audio descriptions for their own later use. Controls worked silently. Dialogue yielded better category learning, with wider distribution of attention. Monologue offered no benefits over working silently. We conclude that negotiating reference compels collaborators to find communicable structure in their shared activity; this social-pragmatic constraint accelerates category learning and likely provides much of the benefit recently ascribed to learning labeled categories. (shrink)

When interlocutors repeatedly describe referents to each other, they rapidly converge on referring expressions which become increasingly systematized and abstract as the interaction progresses. Previous experimental research suggests that interactive repair mechanisms in dialogue underpin convergence. However, this research has so far only focused on the role of other-initiated repair and has not examined whether self-initiated repair might also play a role. To investigate this question, we report the results from a computer-mediated maze task experiment. In this task, participants communicate (...) with each other via an experimental chat tool, which selectively transforms participants’ private turn-revisions into public self-repairs that are made visible to the other participant. For example, if a participant, A, types “On the top square,” and then before sending, A revises the turn to “On the top row,” the server automatically detects the revision and transforms the private turn-revisions into a public self-repair, for example, “On the top square umm I meant row.” Participants who received these transformed turns used more abstract and systematized referring expressions, but performed worse at the task. We argue that this is due to the artificial self-repairs causing participants to put more effort into diagnosing and resolving the referential coordination problems they face in the task, yielding better grounded spatial semantics and consequently increased use of abstract referring expressions. (shrink)

Human cognition and behavior are dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual-level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter-individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a referential communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of recurring meanings to a partner by drawing, but without using their conventional language. Individual-level learning, via observation and cognitive bias, was sufficient (...) to produce signs that became increasingly effective, efficient, and shared over games. However, breaking a referential precedent eliminated these benefits. The most effective, most efficient, and most shared signs arose when participants could directly interact with their partner, indicating that social coordinative learning is important to the creation of shared symbols. Experiment 2 investigated the contribution of two distinct aspects of social interaction: behavior alignment and concurrent partner feedback. Each played a complementary role in the creation of shared symbols: Behavior alignment primarily drove communication effectiveness, and partner feedback primarily drove the efficiency of the evolved signs. In conclusion, inter-individual social coordinative learning is important to the evolution of effective, efficient, and shared symbols. (shrink)

Language maps signals onto meanings through the use of two distinct types of structure. First, the space of meanings is discretized into categories that are shared by all users of the language. Second, the signals employed by the language are compositional: The meaning of the whole is a function of its parts and the way in which those parts are combined. In three iterated learning experiments using a vast, continuous, open-ended meaning space, we explore the conditions under which both structured (...) categories and structured signals emerge ex nihilo. While previous experiments have been limited to either categorical structure in meanings or compositional structure in signals, these experiments demonstrate that when the meaning space lacks clear preexisting boundaries, more subtle morphological structure that lacks straightforward compositionality—as found in natural languages—may evolve as a solution to joint pressures from learning and communication. (shrink)

The meanings of words are not permanent but change over time. Some changes of meaning are quick, such as when a pronoun changes its reference; some are slower, as when two speakers find out that they are using the same word in different senses; and some are very slow, such as when the meaning of a word changes over historical time. A theory of semantics should account for these different time scales. In order to describe these different types of meaning (...) changes, I present an analysis of three levels of communication: instruction, coordination of common ground and coordination of meaning. My first aim is to show that these levels must be considered when discussing lexical semantics. A second aim is to use the levels to identify the communicative roles of some of the main word classes, in particular nouns, adjectives, verbs, indexicals and quantifiers. I argue that the existence of word classes can, to a large extent, be explained by the communicative needs that arise on the different levels. (shrink)

Recent work on the emergence and evolution of human communication has focused on getting novel systems to evolve from scratch in the laboratory. Many of these studies have adopted an interactive construction approach, whereby pairs of participants repeatedly interact with one another to gradually develop their own communication system whilst engaged in some shared task. This paper describes four recent studies that take a different approach, showing how adaptive structure can emerge purely as a result of cultural transmission through single (...) chains of learners. By removing elements of interactive communication and focusing only on the way in which language is repeatedly acquired by learners, we hope to gain a better understanding of how useful structural properties of language could have emerged without being intentionally designed or innovated. (shrink)

In the absence of pre‐established communicative conventions, people create novel communication systems to successfully coordinate their actions toward a joint goal. In this study, we address two types of such novel communication systems: sensorimotor communication, where the kinematics of instrumental actions are systematically modulated, versus symbolic communication. We ask which of the two systems co‐actors preferentially create when aiming to communicate about hidden object properties such as weight. The results of three experiments consistently show that actors who knew the weight (...) of an object transmitted this weight information to their uninformed co‐actors by systematically modulating their instrumental actions, grasping objects of particular weights at particular heights. This preference for sensorimotor communication was reduced in a fourth experiment where co‐actors could communicate with weight‐related symbols. Our findings demonstrate that the use of sensorimotor communication extends beyond the communication of spatial locations to non‐spatial, hidden object properties. (shrink)

To view language as a cultural tool challenges much of what claims to be linguistic science while opening up a new people-centred linguistics. On this view, how we speak, think and act depends on, not just brains, but also cultural traditions. Yet, Everett is conservative: like others trained in distributional analysis, he reifies ‘words’. Though rejecting inner languages and grammatical universals, he ascribes mental reality to a lexicon. Reliant as he is on transcriptions, he takes the cognitivist view that brains (...) represent word-forms. By contrast, in radical embodied cognitive theory, bodily dynamics themselves act as cues to meaning. Linguistic exostructures resemble tools that constrain how people concert acting-perceiving bodies. The result is unending renewal of verbal structures: like artefacts and institutions, they function to sustain a species-specific cultural ecology. As Ross argues, ecological extensions make human cognition hypersocial. When we link verbal patterns with lived experience, we communicate and cognise by fitting action/perception to cultural practices that anchor human meaning making. (shrink)

This paper contrasts two influential theoretical accounts of language change and evolution – Iterated Learning and Social Coordination. The contrast is based on an experiment that compares drawings produced with Garrod et al’s ‘pictionary’ task with those produced in an Iterated Learning version of the same task. The main finding is that Iterated Learning does not lead to the systematic simplification and increased symbolicity of graphical signs produced in the standard interactive version of the task. A second finding is that (...) Iterated Learning leads to less conceptual and structural alignment between participants than observed for those in the interactive condition. The paper concludes with a comparison of the two accounts in relation to how each promotes signs that are effi cient, systematic and learnable. (shrink)

The acceptability of sentences in natural language is constrained not only grammaticality, but also by the relationship between what is being conveyed and such factors as context and the beliefs of interlocutors. In many languages the critical element in a sentence (its focus) must be given grammatical prominence. There are different accounts of the nature of focus marking. Some researchers treat it as the grammatical realization of a potentially arbitrary feature of universal grammar and do not provide an explicit account (...) of its origins; others have argued, however, that focus marking is a (grammaticalized) functional solution to the problem of efficiently transmitting information via a noisy channel. By adding redundancy to highlight critical elements in particular, focus protects key parts of the message from noise. If this information‐theoretic account is true, then we should expect focus‐like behavior to emerge even in non‐linguistic communication systems given sufficient noise and pressures for efficiency. We tested this in an experiment in which participants played a simple communication game in which they had to click cells on a grid to communicate one of two line figures drawn across the grid. We manipulated the noise, available time, and required effort, and measured patterns of redundancy. Because the lines in many cases overlapped, meaning that only some parts of each line could be used to distinguish it from the other, we were able to compare the extent to which effort was expended on adding redundancy to critical (non‐overlapping) and non‐critical (overlapping) parts of the message. The results supported the information‐theoretic account of focus and shed light on the emergence of information structure in language. (shrink)

In language evolution research, the use of computational and experimental methods to investigate the emergence of structure in language is exploding. In this review, we look exclusively at work exploring the emergence of structure in speech, on both a categorical level, and a combinatorial level. We show that computational and experimental methods for investigating population-level processes can be effectively used to explore and measure the effects of learning, communication and transmission on the emergence of structure in speech. We also look (...) at work on child language acquisition as a tool for generating and validating hypotheses for the emergence of speech categories. Further, we review the effects of noise, iconicity and production effects. (shrink)

Human social coordination is often mediated by language. Through verbal dialogue, people direct each other’s attention to properties of their shared environment, they discuss how to jointly solve problems, share their introspections, and distribute roles and assignments. In this article, we propose a dynamical framework for the study of the coordinative role of language. Based on a review of a number of recent experimental studies, we argue that shared symbolic patterns emerge and stabilize through a process of local reciprocal linguistic (...) alignment. Such patterns in turn come to facilitate and refine social coordination by enabling the alignment, joint construction and navigation of conceptual models and actions. Implications of the framework are illustrated and discussed in relation to a case study where dyads of interlocutors interact verbally to reach joint decisions in a perceptual discrimination task. (shrink)

Novel computational representations, such as simulation models of complex systems and video games for scientific discovery, are dramatically changing the way discoveries emerge in science and engineering. The cognitive roles played by such computational representations in discovery are not well understood. We present a theoretical analysis of the cognitive roles such representations play, based on an ethnographic study of the building of computational models in a systems biology laboratory. Specifically, we focus on a case of model-building by an engineer that (...) led to a remarkable discovery in basic bioscience. Accounting for such discoveries requires a distributed cognition analysis, as DC focuses on the roles played by external representations in cognitive processes. However, DC analyses by and large have not examined scientific discovery, and they mostly focus on memory offloading, particularly how the use of existing external representations changes the nature of cognitive tasks. In contrast, we study discovery processes and argue that discoveries emerge from the processes of building the computational representation. The building process integrates manipulations in imagination and in the representation, creating a coupled cognitive system of model and modeler, where the model is incorporated into the modeler's imagination. This account extends DC significantly, and we present some of the theoretical and application implications of this extended account. (shrink)

Computational simulations have provided evidence that the use of linguistic cues as group markers plays an important role in the development of linguistic diversity shortcite. Other simulations, however, have contradicted these findings. Similar disagreements exist in sociolinguistics. This paper describes an experimental study in which participants played an anonymous economic game using an instant-messenger-style program and an artificial ‘alien language’. The competitiveness of the game and the frequency with which players interacted were manipulated. Given frequent enough interaction with team-mates, players (...) were able to use linguistic cues to identify themselves. In the most competitive condition, this led to divergence in the language, which did not occur in other conditions. This suggests that both frequency of interaction and a pressure to use language to mark identity play a significant role in encouraging linguistic divergence over short periods, but that neither is suffi cient on its own. (shrink)

In the last few years, researchers have begun to investigate the emergence of novel forms of human communication in the laboratory. I survey this growing line of research, which may be called experimental semiotics, from three distinct angles. First, I situate the new approach in its theoretical and historical context. Second, I review a sample of studies that exemplify experimental semiotics. Third, I present an empirical study that illustrates how the new approach can help us understand the socio‐cognitive underpinnings of (...) human communication. The main conclusion of the paper will be that, by reproducing micro samples of historical processes in the laboratory, experimental semiotics offers new powerful tools for investigating human communication as a form of joint action. (shrink)

We present an account of semantics that is not construed as a mapping of language to the world but rather as a mapping between individual meaning spaces. The meanings of linguistic entities are established via a “meeting of minds.” The concepts in the minds of communicating individuals are modeled as convex regions in conceptual spaces. We outline a mathematical framework, based on fixpoints in continuous mappings between conceptual spaces, that can be used to model such a semantics. If concepts are (...) convex, it will in general be possible for interactors to agree on joint meaning even if they start out from different representational spaces. Language is discrete, while mental representations tend to be continuous—posing a seeming paradox. We show that the convexity assumption allows us to address this problem. Using examples, we further show that our approach helps explain the semantic processes involved in the composition of expressions. (shrink)

How might a human communication system be bootstrapped in the absence of conventional language? We argue that motivated signs play an important role (i.e., signs that are linked to meaning by structural resemblance or by natural association). An experimental study is then reported in which participants try to communicate a range of pre-specified items to a partner using repeated non-linguistic vocalization, repeated gesture, or repeated non-linguistic vocalization plus gesture (but without using their existing language system). Gesture proved more effective (measured (...) by communication success) and more efficient (measured by the time taken to communicate) than non-linguistic vocalization across a range of item categories (emotion, object, and action). Combining gesture and vocalization did not improve performance beyond gesture alone. We experimentally demonstrate that gesture is a more effective means of bootstrapping a human communication system. We argue that gesture outperforms non-linguistic vocalization because it lends itself more naturally to the production of motivated signs. (shrink)

Although rapidity of fading has been long identified as one of the crucial design features of language, little is known about its effects on the design of communication systems. To investigate such effects, we performed an experiment in which pairs of participants developed novel communication systems using media that had different degrees of rapidity of fading. The results of the experiment suggest that rapidity of fading does not affect the pace with which communication systems emerge or the communicative effi cacy (...) of the emerged systems. However, rapidity of fading seems to affect the design of these systems. In particular, communication systems implemented in the more rapidly fading medium exhibited a higher degree of combinatorial reuse of their forms than systems implemented in the medium that faded more slowly. These results suggest that the design of language might be constrained by subtle relations the presence of which can be ascertained only through direct experimental manipulation. Human communication systems crafted today in the laboratory can provide new insights into the design of natural languages. (shrink)

Human communication is often thought about in terms of transmitted messages in a conventional code like a language. But communication requires a specialized interactive intelligence. Senders have to be able to perform recipient design, while receivers need to be able to do intention recognition, knowing that recipient design has taken place. To study this interactive intelligence in the lab, we developed a new task that taps directly into the underlying abilities to communicate in the absence of a conventional code. We (...) show that subjects are remarkably successful communicators under these conditions, especially when senders get feedback from receivers. Signaling is accomplished by the manner in which an instrumental action is performed, such that instrumentally dysfunctional components of an action are used to convey communicative intentions. The findings have important implications for the nature of the human communicative infrastructure, and the task opens up a line of experimentation on human communication. (shrink)

What is the role of language in social interaction? What does language bring to social encounters? We argue that language can be conceived of as a tool for interacting minds, enabling especially effective and flexible forms of social coordination, perspective-taking and joint action. In a review of evidence from a broad range of disciplines, we pursue elaborations of the language-as-a-tool metaphor, exploring four ways in which language is employed in facilitation of social interaction. We argue that language dramatically extends the (...) possibility-space for interaction, facilitates the profiling and navigation of joint attentional scenes, enables the sharing of situation models and action plans, and mediates the cultural shaping of interacting minds. (shrink)

Universal Grammar (UG) is indeed evolutionarily implausible. But if languages are just to a large primate brain, it is hard to see why other primates do not have complex languages. The answer is that humans have evolved a specialized and uniquely human cognitive architecture, whose main function is to compute mappings between arbitrary signals and communicative intentions. This underlies the development of language in the human species.

Smith gives an excellent overview on research in language evolution, in which he discusses several recent models of how linguistic systems and the cognitive capacities involved in language learning may have co‐evolved. He illustrates how combined pressures on language learning and communication/use produce compositionally structured languages. Once in place, a (culturally transmitted) communication system creates new selection pressures on the capacity for acquiring these systems.

Paulina Sliwa (2015) argues that knowing why p is necessary and sufficient for understanding why p. She tries to rebut recent attacks against the necessity and sufficiency claims, and explains the gradability of understanding why in terms of knowledge. I argue that her attempts do not succeed, but I indicate more promising ways to defend reductionism about understanding why throughout the discussion.

In recent years researchers have begun to investigate how the perceptual, motor and cognitive activities of two or more individuals become organized into coordinated action. In the first part of this introduction we identify three common threads among the ten papers of this special issue that exemplify this new line of research. First, all of the papers are grounded in the experimental study of online interactions between two or more individuals. Second, albeit at different levels of analysis, the contributions focus (...) on the mechanisms supporting joint action. Third, many of the papers investigate empirically the pre‐requisites for the highly sophisticated forms of joint action that are typical of humans. In the second part of the introduction, we summarize each of the papers, highlighting more specific connections among them. (shrink)

How is linguistic communication possible? How do we come to share the same meanings of words and utterances? One classical position holds that human beings share a transcendental “platonic” ideality independent of individual cognition and language use (Frege 1948). Another stresses immanent linguistic relations (Saussure 1959), and yet another basic embodied structures as the ground for invariant aspects of meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Here we propose an alternative account in which the possibility for sharing meaning is motivated by four (...) sources of structural stability: 1) the physical constraints and affordances of our surrounding material environment, 2) biological constraints of our human bodies, 3) social normative constraints of culture and society, and 4) the local history of social interactions. These structures and constraints interact in dynamical ways in actual language usage situations: local dialogical and social dynamics motivate and stabilize the profiling of a conceptual space already highly structured by our shared biology, culture, and environment. We will substantiate this perspective with reference to recent studies in experimental pragmatics and semiotics in which participants interact linguistically to solve cooperative tasks. Three main cases will be considered: The dynamic grounding of linguistic categories, the construction of conceptual models to relate entities in a scene, and the construction of shared conceptual scales for assessing and appraising subjective experiences. (shrink)

The amount of information conveyed by linguistic conventions depends on their precision, yet the codes that humans and other animals use to communicate are quite ambiguous: they may map several vague meanings to the same symbol. How does semantic precision evolve, and what are the constraints that limit it? We address this question using a multiplayer gaming app, where individuals communicate with one another in a scaled-up referential game. Here, the goal is for a sender to use black and white (...) symbols to communicate colors. We expected that the players’ mappings between symbols and colors would grow more specific over time, through a selection process whereby precise mappings are preferentially copied. We found that players become increasingly more precise in their use of symbols over the course of their interactions. This trend did not, however, result from selective copying of precise mappings. We explore the implications of this result for the study of lexical ambiguity, Zipf's Law of Meaning, and disagreements over semantic conventions. (shrink)

Production and comprehension have long been viewed as inseparable components of language. The study of vision, by contrast, has centered almost exclusively on comprehension. Here we investigate drawing—the most basic form of visual production. How do we convey concepts in visual form, and how does refining this skill, in turn, affect recognition? We developed an online platform for collecting large amounts of drawing and recognition data, and applied a deep convolutional neural network model of visual cortex trained only on natural (...) images to explore the hypothesis that drawing recruits the same abstract feature representations that support natural visual object recognition. Consistent with this hypothesis, higher layers of this model captured the abstract features of both drawings and natural images most important for recognition, and people learning to produce more recognizable drawings of objects exhibited enhanced recognition of those objects. These findings could explain why drawing is so effective for communicating visual concepts, they suggest novel approaches for evaluating and refining conceptual knowledge, and they highlight the potential of deep networks for understanding human learning. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of iconicity in spoken language and other human communication systems. First, we concentrate on graphical and gestural communication and show how semantically motivated iconic signs play an important role in creating such communication systems from scratch. We then consider how iconic signs tend to become simplified and symbolic as the communication system matures and argue that this process is driven by repeated interactive use of the signs. We then consider evidence for iconicity at the level (...) of the system in graphical communication and finally draw comparisons between iconicity in graphical and gestural communication systems and in spoken language. (shrink)

In signaling games, a sender has private access to a state of affairs and uses a signal to inform a receiver about that state. If no common association of signals and states is initially available, sender and receiver must coordinate to develop one. How do players divide coordination labor? We show experimentally that, if players switch roles at each communication round, coordination labor is shared. However, in games with fixed roles, coordination labor is divided: Receivers adjust their mappings more frequently, (...) whereas senders maintain the initial code, which is transmitted to receivers and becomes the common code. In a series of computer simulations, player and role asymmetry as observed experimentally were accounted for by a model in which the receiver in the first signaling round has a higher chance of adjusting its code than its partner. From this basic division of labor among players, certain properties of role asymmetry, in particular correlations with game complexity, are seen to follow. (shrink)

Our target article argued that a genetically specified Universal Grammar (UG), capturing arbitrary properties of languages, is not tenable on evolutionary grounds, and that the close fit between language and language learners arises because language is shaped by the brain, rather than the reverse. Few commentaries defend a genetically specified UG. Some commentators argue that we underestimate the importance of processes of cultural transmission; some propose additional cognitive and brain mechanisms that may constrain language and perhaps differentiate humans from nonhuman (...) primates; and others argue that we overstate or understate the case against co-evolution of language genes. In engaging with these issues, we suggest that a new synthesis concerning the relationship between brains, genes, and language may be emerging. (shrink)

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. (shrink)