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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Language emergence involves cognitive biases and learning mechanisms.
  • Silent gesture provides a model for studying language origins without conventional systems.
  • Event properties, like reversibility, influence communication structure.

Purpose of the Study:

  • Investigate the interaction of cognitive biases and learning in language convention emergence.
  • Examine how event properties, specifically reversibility, affect word order in silent gesture.
  • Analyze the impact of communicative interaction on word order consistency.

Main Methods:

  • Silent gesture production experiments without speech.
  • Fine-grained analysis of event reversibility based on verb and object properties.
  • Comparison of word order variability in isolated production versus interactive communication.

Main Results:

  • Event reversibility, determined by verb and object characteristics, significantly impacts word order variability.
  • Silent gesture data support the 'noisy channel' account of constituent order.
  • Communicative interaction leads to increased word order consistency, particularly for less reversible events.

Conclusions:

  • Cognitive biases and learning interact dynamically during language convention formation.
  • Event reversibility is a key factor influencing structural choices in early communication.
  • While consistency is theoretically optimal, practical language use is nuanced and context-dependent.