1,720,979 research outputs found
Exploring expressivity: A closer look at the evolution of linguistic structure
No full textCompositionality, a unique and fundamental property of human language, emerges from the pressures placed on language as it is learnt and used by consecutive generations – the pressure for learnability, arising from the transmission process, and a pressure for expressivity imposed by the use of language to convey meaning. This study uses human diffusion chains to explore the contribution that learning and communication make to the cultural evolution of linguistic structure. Languages are exposed to either a learning pressure, a communication pressure, or both. The language in the communication chain became expressive and showed varying degrees of structure, in some cases deliberately introduced as an aid to comprehension. This puts the focus back on the cognitive processes of language users, and emphasises the role of recipient design in the emergence of structure in language. The languages in the learning conditions struggled to maintain a significant degree of structure, contrary to expectations. However, the development of the languages provides clues about the way that language adapts in response to the particular communicative and learning environment
Cross-situational inference and meaning space structure
Get PDFHumans use language to direct each other’s attention to complex meanings. Researchers hold differing opinions on the evolutionary origin of these meanings: some hypothesise that human ancestors had innate, pre-linguistic concepts, similar to the referents of present-day nouns and verbs; others that simple meanings were broken down from initially complex meanings associated with specific situations. Experimental investigations of language evolution, meanwhile, have generally assumed a structured, pre-existing meaning space. This dissertation argues that a closer look at the ostensive-inferential nature of human communication supports a different account of the emergence of meanings and challenges the assumption of a pre-existing meaning space. Building on an experimental paradigm from Xu & Tenenbaum (2007), participants were presented with scenes of complex events to test how their meaning inferences were affected by the interaction of suspicious patterns in training input with their world knowledge. The results showed that the complexity of meaning lexicalised depended on this interaction, with substantial variation caused by both differing salience effects of events and differing world knowledge of participants. This result shows that meaning grounding in humans is not simply a matter of matching words to pre-existing cognitive concepts, or of associating a word with a specific recurring situation, but is an intelligent process crucially sensitive to the speaker’s intention to communicate. Further investigation is called for into the role of communication in forming a meaning space, and what determines this meaning space’s structure
Theory of mind and language evolution: an exploration of rapid and involuntary perspective-taking
Get PDFCurrent research on language evolution has provided considerable insight into the emergence of linguistic structure, but much of this research does not account for how language users access speaker meanings to build mappings between meanings and signals. Signal-meaning mappings may arise in natural communication systems by three main routes: signal first, meaning first, or signal and meaning simultaneously. Humans seem uniquely capable of creating new simultaneous signal-meaning pairs as a result of our ability to make our communicative intentions apparent. This "ostensive-inferential'' communication can explain how meanings are attached to novel signals in infancy, emerging languages, and everyday communication by appealing to mindreading, or theory of mind – the ability to infer the intentions, knowledge, and other mental states of interlocutors.
The ostensive-inferential model of communication has been criticised on the grounds of implausibility; specifically, that neither infants nor adults are capable of the kind of rapid and complex mindreading required by this model. However, a range of experimental paradigms appear to show evidence of rapid and unconscious mindreading in both adults and infants. One paradigm in particular, the Dot Perspective Task (DPT), has been argued to show evidence of "spontaneous" or "automatic" mindreading in adults, although this interpretation is the subject of considerable dispute, with some evidence suggesting that the results are best explained by cognitive processes that do not involve mindreading.
In this thesis, I present a range of experiments using the Dot Perspective Task to investigate whether the classic result in this paradigm is best explained by mindreading or by alternative explanations. Using an adapted and extended set of DPT stimuli, I first investigate whether the "mindreading" effect is found only for human-like avatars, or whether it extends to non-human arrows. An exploratory analysis of the data from this task suggests that the results may be best explained by a spatial confound in the stimuli.
A subtle but critical difference in the implementation of DPT variants in the literature may explain not just this result, but other irreconcilable differences in the DPT literature. In a sequence of five experiments, I investigate this variation in experimental method. The results from these tasks suggest that the DPT does not demonstrate automatic mindreading – that is, mindreading that is reflexive and purely stimulus driven; but rather spontaneous mindreading, or mindreading that is rapid, unconscious and involuntary, but directed by attentional systems. This finding prompts us to clearly distinguish spontaneity from automaticity.
I present two further experiments investigating the mechanism underlying the classic DPT result. An adaptation of the DPT produced null results, as did a simplified version of the same task. This null result may be explained by the increased demand of the task, but given inconsistent findings across the DPT literature, it may also be the case that the classic DPT finding is less robust than it appears to be. I therefore review the current literature on failed replications in psychology and other disciplines, identifying how the problems described in this literature are relevant to the Dot Perspective Task. I argue that the use of the DPT to investigate rapid and involuntary mindreading remains promising, but that drawing firm conclusions from this paradigm will require replications of the current results with sufficient statistical power, as well as a thorough investigation of the wide range of methodological implementations that may affect the results of the task.
Finally, I explore an alternative route for future investigation of the plausibility of the ostensive-inferential model of communication. I discuss current attempts to reconcile the ostensive account with empirical research on mindreading, arguing that "minimalist" accounts of ostension fail to capture some of the central features of ostensive communication. I then suggest a reformulation of ostension that draws on the concepts of joint attention, common ground and mutual manifestness to offer an account of ostension that is both developmentally and cognitively more plausible than an account that relies on mindreading. I suggest that joint attention would be a fruitful avenue for future research on ostension
Evolutionary psycholinguistic approach to the pragmatics of reference
Get PDFPragmatics concerns the material function of language use in the world, and thus
touches on profound questions about the relationship between our cognition and the
environments in which we operate. Both psycholinguistics and evolutionary linguistics
have afforded greater attention to pragmatics in recent years. Though the potential
of evolutionary psycholinguistics has been noted for over twenty-five years (e.g.
Tooby & Cosmides, 1990; Scott-Phillips, 2010a), there has arguably been little dialogue
between these two fields of study. This thesis explicitly acknowledges and investigates
the adaptationist nature of functional claims in psycholinguistics, and attempts
to demonstrate that psycholinguistic inquiry can provide evidence that is relevant to
theories of how the cognitive architecture of linguistic communication evolved.
Chapter two reviews a broad polarisation in the pragmatic and psycholinguistic literature
concerning the relative roles of linguistic convention and contextual information
in comprehension. It makes explicit the theoretical approaches that reliably give
rise to these polar positions across scholarly domains. It goes on to map each model of
comprehension to the adaptationist particulars it may entail, and in doing so illustrates
two different pictures of how linguistic cognition has developed over phylogeny. The
Social Adaptation Hypothesis (SAH) holds that linguistic comprehension is performed
by relevance-oriented inferential mechanisms that have been selected for by a social
environment (i.e. inference-using conspecifics). In particular, the SAH holds that linguistic
conventions are attended to in the same way as other ostensive stimuli and
contextual information, and because of their relevance to communicative interactions.
The Linguistic Adaptation Hypothesis (LAH) holds that linguistic comprehension is
performed by specialised cognition that has been selected for by a linguistic environment
(i.e. language-using conspecifics) that was established subsequent to, and as a
consequence of, the emergence of inferential communication. In particular, the LAH
holds that linguistic conventions are a privileged domain of input for the comprehension
system. The plausibility and congruence of both accounts with the current state
of knowledge about the evolutionary picture necessitates empirical psycholinguistic
evidence.
The remainder of the thesis presents a series of experiments investigating referential
expressions relevant to the contrastive predictions of these two adaptationist accounts.
The broad question that covers all of these experiments is: how sensitive is the
comprehension process to linguistic input qua linguistic input, relative to various other
grades of relevant contextual information?
Chapter three presents a reaction time experiment that uses speaker-specific facts
about referents as referring expressions, in a conversational precedent paradigm. The
experiment measures the relative sensitivity of comprehension processing to the knowledge
states of speakers and the consistent use of linguistic labels, and finds greater
sensitivity to linguistic labels.
Chapter four introduces a further contextual variable into this paradigm, in the form
of culturally copresent associations between labels and referents. The experiment presented
in this chapter compares the relative sensitivity of processing to culturally copresent
common ground, the privileged knowledge state of speakers, and the consistent
use of linguistic labels. The results indicated greater sensitivity to linguistic labels
overall, and were consistent with the LAH.
Chapter five turns to visual context as a constraint on reference, and presents two
pairs of experiments. Experiments 3 and 4 investigate the comprehension of referring
expressions across congruous, incongruous, and abstract visual contexts. The experiments
measured reaction time as subjects were prompted to identify constituent parts
of tangram pictures. The results indicated a sensitivity to the visual context and the
linguistic labels, and are broadly consistent with the SAH. If comprehension is characterised
by particular sensitivities, we may expect speakers to produce utterances that
lend themselves well to how hearers process them. Experiments 5 and 6 use a similar
tangram paradigm to elicit referring expressions from speakers for component parts
of tangrams. The experiments measure the consistency of produced labels for the
same referents across visual contexts of varied congruity. The results indicated some
methodological limitations of the tangram paradigm for the study of repeated reference
across contexts.
Lastly, the thesis concludes by considering the SAH and LAH in light of the empirical
evidence presented and its accompanying limitations, and argues that the evidence
is generally consistent with the assumptions of the LAH
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Syntax of Mind – Semantics of Mind: Two Frameworks for Comparative Approaches to the Evolution of Language and Music
No full textProceedings of the 9th International Conference (EVOLANG9), Kyoto/Japan, 13–16 March 201
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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