Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, United States.
Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, United States.
Cognition. 2018 Jan;170:298-311. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.10.014. Epub 2017 Nov 5.
The question of how behavioral variants compete and propagate is of primary importance to the study of cultural evolution; with respect to language, it is also an important focus of the field of sociolinguistics. Variant propagation can occur by neutral means-akin to drift in biological evolution-or through selection, whereby individuals are biased in what variants they adopt. An important bias concerns social meaning, and sociolinguistic theory distinguishes between variants that are primarily associated with a particular social group (such as working-class people or Texans) and variants primarily associated with a perceived trait of the group (such as toughness). In the former case, variants are hypothesized to propagate neutrally; in the latter case, provided the trait is socially relevant to adopters, variants are hypothesized to be subject to selection and to propagate more readily. To test this hypothesis we conducted an experimental study in which groups of four participants played a game that involved instant messaging in an artificial "alien language" with two dialects. Each player was assigned to one of two alien species, the weaker Wiwos or the tougher Burls. The social meaning of one feature of the Burl dialect was manipulated, and the results strongly supported the hypothesis: Variants from the Burl dialect were used by Wiwos in all conditions, but when associated primarily with "tougher aliens", the rate of adoption was significantly greater than when they were associated primarily with "Burls". When toughness was made irrelevant to the game, the effect of association disappeared, emphasizing the importance of social relevance in the propagation of behavioral variants.
行为变体如何竞争和传播的问题是文化进化研究的首要问题；就语言而言，它也是社会语言学领域的一个重要焦点。变体传播可以通过中性方式发生——类似于生物进化中的漂移——也可以通过选择发生，即个体在选择采用哪些变体时存在偏见。一个重要的偏见涉及社会意义，社会语言学理论区分了主要与特定社会群体相关的变体（如工人阶级或得克萨斯人）和主要与群体感知特征相关的变体（如坚韧）。在前一种情况下，假设变体以中性方式传播；在后一种情况下，只要特征对采用者具有社会相关性，就假设变体受到选择的影响，并且更容易传播。为了检验这一假设，我们进行了一项实验研究，其中四组参与者玩了一个游戏，在一个人造的“外星语言”中用两种方言进行即时通讯。每个参与者都被分配到两个外星物种之一，较弱的 Wiwos 或更强硬的 Burls。Burl 方言的一个特征的社会意义被操纵，结果强烈支持了这一假设：在所有条件下，Wiwos 都使用 Burl 方言的变体，但当与“更坚韧的外星人”主要相关时，采用率明显高于与“Burls”主要相关时。当坚韧与游戏无关紧要时，关联的效果就消失了，这强调了社会相关性在行为变体传播中的重要性。
