Skirgård Hedvig, Roberts Seán G, Yencken Lars
The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity Laureate project, Department of Linguistics, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia.
Language & Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2017 Apr 5;12(4):e0165934. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0165934. eCollection 2017.
In this paper we explore the results of a large-scale online game called 'the Great Language Game', in which people listen to an audio speech sample and make a forced-choice guess about the identity of the language from 2 or more alternatives. The data include 15 million guesses from 400 audio recordings of 78 languages. We investigate which languages are confused for which in the game, and if this correlates with the similarities that linguists identify between languages. This includes shared lexical items, similar sound inventories and established historical relationships. Our findings are, as expected, that players are more likely to confuse two languages that are objectively more similar. We also investigate factors that may affect players' ability to accurately select the target language, such as how many people speak the language, how often the language is mentioned in written materials and the economic power of the target language community. We see that non-linguistic factors affect players' ability to accurately identify the target. For example, languages with wider 'global reach' are more often identified correctly. This suggests that both linguistic and cultural knowledge influence the perception and recognition of languages and their similarity.
在本文中，我们探讨了一款名为“伟大语言游戏”的大型在线游戏的结果。在该游戏中，人们收听一段音频语音样本，并从两种或更多备选语言中做出强制选择，猜测语言的种类。数据包括来自78种语言的400段音频记录的1500万次猜测。我们研究了在游戏中哪些语言会被混淆，以及这是否与语言学家所确定的语言之间的相似性相关。这包括共享的词汇项目、相似的语音库以及已确立的历史关系。不出所料，我们的研究结果是，玩家更有可能混淆客观上更相似的两种语言。我们还研究了可能影响玩家准确选择目标语言能力的因素，例如说该语言的人数、该语言在书面材料中被提及的频率以及目标语言群体的经济实力。我们发现非语言因素会影响玩家准确识别目标的能力。例如，具有更广泛“全球影响力”的语言更常被正确识别。这表明语言知识和文化知识都会影响对语言及其相似性的感知和识别。
