How Language Adapts to the Environment: An Evolutionary Experimental Approach
Jonas Nölle, Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh
Thursday, Dec 17 2020, 14:00-14:30 GMT
Zoom Details: [Please Request]
This thesis investigates experimentally whether cross-linguistic variation in the structure of languages can be motivated by external factors, such as the social or physical environment. From observational and correlational data alone, it remains difficult to infer the exact underlying mechanisms. I present a novel experimental approach for studying the relationship between language and environment directly in the lab using referential communication games.
This talk focuses on a set of experiments looking at the complex issue of variation in spatial language that has been proposed to interact with topography (e.g., landmarks like rivers, slopes) and sociocultural factors (e.g., bilingualism, subsistence style, population density). Such factors seem to affect whether speakers rely on an egocentric or geocentric Frame of Reference (FoR), but their exact contributions remain unclear. I address this with a novel Virtual Reality (VR) paradigm that allows for an unprecedented combination of ecological validity and experimental control. In networked VR experiments, participants had to solve spatial coordination games in realistic environments such as a forest or mountain slope. Speakers of English, which is usually associated with an egocentric FoR, were less likely to use egocentric language (e.g., “the orb is to your left”) if strong environmental affordances made geocentric language more viable (e.g., “the orb is uphill from you”), indicating an effect of topography.
Follow-up experiments addressed whether the cultural ‘success’ of egocentric left/right could be motivated by its applicability across environments. For this, I combined VR with the ‘experimental semiotics’ approach, where the game is solved via a novel visual communication channel. I show how movement data from the 3D world can be correlated with invented signals to measure which FoR participants rely on. In contrast to the English data, I did not find an advantage for geocentric systems in the slope environment, and overwhelmingly egocentric systems emerged. I discuss how this could relate to task-specificity and native language background.
Finally, I show how this new way of studying spatial language with interactive VR games can be used to test hypotheses about linguistic transmission and material culture that could help explain the origins of the egocentric FoR system, which is regarded a fairly recent cultural innovation. More generally, I suggest that VR can be used to study the evolution of language in complex, multimodal settings without sacrificing experimental control.