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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Feb 13, 2026

RNA Secondary Structure Prediction Using High-throughput SHAPE

RNA Secondary Structure Prediction Using High-throughput SHAPE

Published on: May 31, 2013

Contextual predictability shapes signal autonomy.

James Winters¹, Simon Kirby², Kenny Smith²

¹The Minds and Traditions Research Group, Max Plank Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.

|March 14, 2018

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Communication balances simplicity and informativeness. Contextual predictability influences this balance, leading to context-dependent or autonomous signals based on environmental information. This shapes language structure.

Keywords:

Communication games Context Interaction Language evolution Pragmatics

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Linguistics
Evolutionary Biology

Background:

Shared communication systems balance signal simplicity and informativeness.
Contextual predictability, the sender's ability to estimate contextual information, is key to this balance.
This study investigates the link between contextual predictability and signal autonomy.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine if contextual predictability causally influences signal autonomy.
To explore how communication systems adapt to varying levels of contextual predictability.
To understand the role of pragmatic inference in shaping language structure.

Main Methods:

An asymmetric communication game with fixed sender and receiver roles was employed.
Two aspects of referential context were manipulated: shared access to context and generalizability of context.
The degree of signal autonomy was measured in relation to contextual predictability.

Main Results:

High contextual predictability leads to context-dependent signals that rely on shared information.
Low contextual predictability favors autonomous signals with explicit encoding of meaning.
Contextual predictability directly shapes the development of signal autonomy.

Conclusions:

Pragmatic inference and context integration are central to language structure.
The predictability of the communication environment influences the evolution of linguistic strategies.
Language adapts to optimize information transfer under varying contextual constraints.