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Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication

How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments (in which participants improvis...

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Autores principales: Schouwstra, Marieke, Naegeli, Danielle, Kirby, Simon
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9072621/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35529568
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.805144
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author Schouwstra, Marieke
Naegeli, Danielle
Kirby, Simon
author_facet Schouwstra, Marieke
Naegeli, Danielle
Kirby, Simon
author_sort Schouwstra, Marieke
collection PubMed
description How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments (in which participants improvise to use gesture but no speech) have been used to investigate cognitive biases that shape utterances produced in the absence of a conventional language system. In this mode of communication, participants do not follow the dominant order of their native language (e.g., Subject-Verb-Object), and instead condition the structure on the semantic properties of the events they are conveying. An important source of variability in structure in silent gesture is the property of reversibility. Reversible events typically have two animate participants whose roles can be reversed (girl kicks boy). Without a syntactic/conventional means of conveying who does what to whom, there is inherent unclarity about the agent and patient roles in the event (by contrast, this is less pressing for non-reversible events like girl kicks ball). In experiment 1 we test a novel, fine-grained analysis of reversibility. Presenting a silent gesture production experiment, we show that the variability in word order depends on two factors (properties of the verb and properties of the direct object) that together determine how reversible an event is. We relate our experimental results to principles from information theory, showing that our data support the “noisy channel” account of constituent order. In experiment 2, we focus on the influence of interaction on word order variability for reversible and non-reversible events. We show that when participants use silent gesture for communicative interaction, they become more consistent in their usage of word order over time, however, this pattern less pronounced for events that are classified as strongly non-reversible. We conclude that full consistency in word order is theoretically a good strategy, but word order use in practice is a more complex phenomenon.
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spelling pubmed-90726212022-05-07 Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication Schouwstra, Marieke Naegeli, Danielle Kirby, Simon Front Psychol Psychology How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments (in which participants improvise to use gesture but no speech) have been used to investigate cognitive biases that shape utterances produced in the absence of a conventional language system. In this mode of communication, participants do not follow the dominant order of their native language (e.g., Subject-Verb-Object), and instead condition the structure on the semantic properties of the events they are conveying. An important source of variability in structure in silent gesture is the property of reversibility. Reversible events typically have two animate participants whose roles can be reversed (girl kicks boy). Without a syntactic/conventional means of conveying who does what to whom, there is inherent unclarity about the agent and patient roles in the event (by contrast, this is less pressing for non-reversible events like girl kicks ball). In experiment 1 we test a novel, fine-grained analysis of reversibility. Presenting a silent gesture production experiment, we show that the variability in word order depends on two factors (properties of the verb and properties of the direct object) that together determine how reversible an event is. We relate our experimental results to principles from information theory, showing that our data support the “noisy channel” account of constituent order. In experiment 2, we focus on the influence of interaction on word order variability for reversible and non-reversible events. We show that when participants use silent gesture for communicative interaction, they become more consistent in their usage of word order over time, however, this pattern less pronounced for events that are classified as strongly non-reversible. We conclude that full consistency in word order is theoretically a good strategy, but word order use in practice is a more complex phenomenon. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-04-22 /pmc/articles/PMC9072621/ /pubmed/35529568 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.805144 Text en Copyright © 2022 Schouwstra, Naegeli and Kirby. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Schouwstra, Marieke
Naegeli, Danielle
Kirby, Simon
Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication
title Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication
title_full Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication
title_fullStr Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication
title_full_unstemmed Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication
title_short Investigating Word Order Emergence: Constraints From Cognition and Communication
title_sort investigating word order emergence: constraints from cognition and communication
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9072621/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35529568
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.805144
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