Misyak Jennifer, Noguchi Takao, Chater Nick
1 Behavioural Science Group, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick.
2 Department of Psychology, University of Warwick.
Psychol Sci. 2016 Dec;27(12):1550-1561. doi: 10.1177/0956797616661199. Epub 2016 Oct 29.
Humans can communicate even with few existing conventions in common (e.g., when they lack a shared language). We explored what makes this phenomenon possible with a nonlinguistic experimental task requiring participants to coordinate toward a common goal. We observed participants creating new communicative conventions using the most minimal possible signals. These conventions, furthermore, changed on a trial-by-trial basis in response to shared environmental and task constraints. Strikingly, as a result, signals of the same form successfully conveyed contradictory messages from trial to trial. Such behavior is evidence for the involvement of what we term joint inference, in which social interactants spontaneously infer the most sensible communicative convention in light of the common ground between them. Joint inference may help to elucidate how communicative conventions emerge instantaneously and how they are modified and reshaped into the elaborate systems of conventions involved in human communication, including natural languages.
即使人类之间几乎没有共同的现有惯例（例如，当他们缺乏共同语言时），他们也能够进行交流。我们通过一项非语言实验任务探索了使这种现象成为可能的因素，该任务要求参与者朝着共同目标进行协调。我们观察到参与者使用尽可能少的信号创建新的交流惯例。此外，这些惯例会根据共享的环境和任务限制在每次试验中发生变化。令人惊讶的是，结果相同形式的信号在每次试验中成功传达了相互矛盾的信息。这种行为证明了我们所说的联合推理的参与，在联合推理中，社会互动者根据他们之间的共同基础自发推断出最合理的交流惯例。联合推理可能有助于阐明交流惯例是如何瞬间出现的，以及它们是如何被修改和重塑为包括自然语言在内的人类交流中所涉及的复杂惯例系统的。
