Cultural Evolution of Precise and Agreed-Upon Semantic Conventions in a Multiplayer Gaming App.
Experimental semiotics
Language evolution
Lexical semantics
Sense entropy
Zipf's Law of Meaning
Journal
Cognitive science
ISSN: 1551-6709
Titre abrégé: Cogn Sci
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 7708195
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
02 2022
02 2022
Historique:
revised:
30
11
2021
received:
05
02
2021
accepted:
21
01
2022
entrez:
17
2
2022
pubmed:
18
2
2022
medline:
2
4
2022
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
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.
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
e13113Informations de copyright
© 2022 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).
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