The Minds and Traditions Research Group, Max Plank Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2018 Jul;176:15-30. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.002. Epub 2018 Mar 10.
Aligning on a shared system of communication requires senders and receivers reach a balance between simplicity, where there is a pressure for compressed representations, and informativeness, where there is a pressure to be communicatively functional. We investigate the extent to which these two pressures are governed by contextual predictability: the amount of contextual information that a sender can estimate, and therefore exploit, in conveying their intended meaning. In particular, we test the claim that contextual predictability is causally related to signal autonomy: the degree to which a signal can be interpreted in isolation, without recourse to contextual information. Using an asymmetric communication game, where senders and receivers are assigned fixed roles, we manipulate two aspects of the referential context: (i) whether or not a sender shares access to the immediate contextual information used by the receiver in interpreting their utterance; (ii) the extent to which the relevant solution in the immediate referential context is generalisable to the aggregate set of contexts. Our results demonstrate that contextual predictability shapes the degree of signal autonomy: when the context is highly predictable (i.e., the sender has access to the context in which their utterances will be interpreted, and the semantic dimension which discriminates between meanings in context is consistent across communicative episodes), languages develop which rely heavily on the context to reduce uncertainty about the intended meaning. When the context is less predictable, senders favour systems composed of autonomous signals, where all potentially relevant semantic dimensions are explicitly encoded. Taken together, these results suggest that our pragmatic faculty, and how it integrates information from the context in reducing uncertainty, plays a central role in shaping language structure.
为了实现共享的交流系统，发送者和接收者需要在简洁性和信息量之间达到平衡，简洁性要求信息被压缩，信息量要求信息具有交流功能。我们研究了这两种压力在多大程度上受到语境可预测性的影响：发送者可以估计多少语境信息，以及可以利用这些信息来传达其意图。具体来说，我们测试了语境可预测性与信号自主性之间的因果关系的假设：信号在多大程度上可以独立解释，而无需依赖语境信息。我们使用非对称交流游戏，其中发送者和接收者被分配固定的角色，操纵参考语境的两个方面：(i)发送者是否共享接收者在解释其话语时使用的即时语境信息；(ii)即时参考语境中相关解决方案在总体语境集中的可推广程度。我们的结果表明，语境可预测性塑造了信号自主性的程度：当语境高度可预测时（即发送者可以访问其话语将被解释的语境，并且区分语境中含义的语义维度在整个交流过程中是一致的），语言发展就会依赖于语境来减少对意图的理解的不确定性。当语境不太可预测时，发送者倾向于使用由自主信号组成的系统，其中所有潜在相关的语义维度都被明确编码。总之，这些结果表明，我们的语用能力以及它如何整合来自语境的信息以减少不确定性，在塑造语言结构方面发挥着核心作用。
