Minds and Traditions Research Group, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Institut Jean Nicod, Département d'études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL University.
Cogn Sci. 2022 Feb;46(2):e13113. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13113.
The amount of information conveyed by linguistic conventions depends on their precision, yet the codes that humans and other animals use to communicate are quite ambiguous: they may map several vague meanings to the same symbol. How does semantic precision evolve, and what are the constraints that limit it? We address this question using a multiplayer gaming app, where individuals communicate with one another in a scaled-up referential game. Here, the goal is for a sender to use black and white symbols to communicate colors. We expected that the players' mappings between symbols and colors would grow more specific over time, through a selection process whereby precise mappings are preferentially copied. We found that players become increasingly more precise in their use of symbols over the course of their interactions. This trend did not, however, result from selective copying of precise mappings. We explore the implications of this result for the study of lexical ambiguity, Zipf's Law of Meaning, and disagreements over semantic conventions.
语言惯例所传达的信息量取决于其精确程度，但人类和其他动物用来交流的代码相当模糊：它们可能将多个模糊的含义映射到同一个符号上。语义精度如何演变，限制它的约束条件是什么？我们使用一款多人游戏应用程序来解决这个问题，在这个应用程序中，个人之间通过放大的参照游戏进行交流。在这里，发送者的目标是使用黑白符号来传达颜色。我们预计，随着时间的推移，通过一种优先复制精确映射的选择过程，玩家在符号和颜色之间的映射会变得更加具体。我们发现，玩家在互动过程中对符号的使用变得越来越精确。然而，这种趋势并不是由于精确映射的选择性复制所致。我们探讨了这一结果对词汇歧义、意义的齐夫定律以及语义惯例分歧的研究的影响。
