Author: Fiona Kirton

An experimental approach to the evolution of competing spatial referencing strategies

Jonas Nölle (Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh)

Tuesday 4 September 2018, 11:30–12:30
1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

Recently, there has been lively debate about the relation of language and its wider environment. The idea is that language structure does not evolve in a void, but is partly motivated by social and ecological variables leading to diversity (Lupyan & Dale, 2016). Whether the striking cross-cultural variation in spatial language and cognition can also be explained by adaptation to specific ‘niches’ is subject of an ongoing debate (e.g., Majid et al., 2004), where different proposals such as socio-topographic and contact diffusion have been put forward (Bohnemeyer et al., 2015; Palmer, Lum, Schlossberg, & Gaby, 2017). However, exact causal relationships and evolutionary trajectories have yet to be shown, as there are many contributing and confounding variables and quantification can be become extremely complex. I therefore suggest complementing this line of research, that so far has mostly relied on field-work, with an evolutionary approach by modelling the evolution of competing spatial referencing strategies in different environments using both experiments and simulations. I will discuss work in progress regarding a series of VR referential games, were subject pairs must establish spatial referencing conventions in order to score. The experiments assess whether salient affordances in the task environment (e.g., a simulated forest vs a slope-like environment) can motivate referencing based on different strategies in otherwise identical tasks. In addition, I show how findings from such experiments can be integrated these with findings from a series of computational models using artificial agents (Spranger, 2016) to simulate how different strategies stabilize in interaction over large timescales that we could not easily observe in the lab or in field-work.

References
Bohnemeyer, J., Donelson, K. T., Moore, R. E., Benedicto, E., Eggleston, A., O’Meara, C. K., … Gómez, M. de J. S. H. (2015). The Contact Diffusion of Linguistic Practices. Language Dynamics and Change, 5(2), 169–201.
Lupyan, G., & Dale, R. (2016). Why Are There Different Languages? The Role of Adaptation in Linguistic Diversity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 649–660.
Majid, A., Bowerman, M., Kita, S., Haun, D. B., & Levinson, S. C. (2004). Can language restructure cognition? The case for space. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(3), 108–114.
Palmer, B., Lum, J., Schlossberg, J., & Gaby, A. (2017). How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology, 21(3), 457–491. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2017-0011
Spranger, M. (2016). The evolution of grounded spatial language. Language Science Press.

Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase

Alexander Martin, Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh

Tuesday 28 August 2018, 11:30–12:30
1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

Of the 24 possible orderings of the nominal modifiers Demonstrative, Numeral, Adjective and the Noun, two specific patterns dominate the typology: Dem Num Adj N (as in English) and its mirror order N Adj Num Dem (as in Thai). This has been argued to follow from a universal underlying structure in which Adj forms a constituent with N first, Num scopes over that constituent, and finally Dem takes widest scope. We refer to noun phrase orders that follow this structure as scope-isomorphic. To test for general scope-isomorphic preferences in language users and assess a possible asymmetry between pre- and postnominal modifiers, we tested two linguistic populations with different NP orderings (English and Thai). Learners were exposed to a new language where modifiers were placed on the opposite side of the noun from their native language (i.e., English speakers learned that modifiers in the new language were postnominal and Thai speakers that they were prenominal). Crucially, though, learners were exposed only to single-modifier NPs (e.g., ‘car green’ or ‘car this’) but were not shown how modifiers were ordered relative to one another in multiple modifier phrases. In a test phase, participants were asked how to translate phrases with multiple modifiers into the new language (e.g., ‘this green car’). Speakers of both languages overwhelmingly inferred scope-isomorphic patterns (i.e., they preferred ‘car green this’ over ‘car this green’). We additionally found that Thai participants showed a stronger preference for scope isomorphism, suggesting the possibility that prenominal orders which violate scope isomorphism are particularly dispreferred. We will discuss these results in light of syntactic theory which predicts a pre-/postnominal asymmetry, but will also consider the possible influence of L2 knowledge (specifically Thai speakers’ knowledge of English) on these results, and outline future studies designed to tackle this issue.