Change and variation, while inherent to language, might be seen as running counter to human communicative needs. However, variation also gives language the power to convey reliable indexical information about the speaker. This has been argued to play a significant role in allowing the establishment of large communities based on cooperative exchange , although there has been little experimental investigation of the hypothesis. Here I present a preliminary study intended to help fill this gap. Participants played an online team game (...) in which they negotiated anonymously for resources using an artificial language. Players succeeded in using linguistic cues to distinguish between their teammates and their opponents, and displayed between-team variation in the use of the language. (shrink)

How do communities establish shared communication systems? The Common Knowledge view assumes that symbolic conventions develop through the accumulation of common knowledge regarding communication practices among the members of a community. In contrast with this view, it is proposed that coordinated communication emerges a by‐product of local interactions among dyads. A set of multi‐agent computer simulations show that a population of “egocentric” agents can establish and maintain symbolic conventions without common knowledge. In the simulations, convergence to a single conventional system (...) was most likely and most efficient when agents updated their behavior on the basis of local rather than global, system‐level information. The massive feedback and parallelism present in the simulations gave rise to phenomena that are often assumed to result from complex strategic processing on the part of individual agents. The implications of these findings for the development of theories of language use are discussed. (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)