English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

The Interactive Origin of Iconicity

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons79032

Roberts,  Sean G.
Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol;
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

Tamariz_et_al-2018-Cognitive_Science.pdf
(Publisher version), 771KB

Supplementary Material (public)

Tamariz_et_al-2017-Cognitive_Science.sup-1.pdf
(Supplementary material), 9MB

Citation

Tamariz, M., Roberts, S. G., Martínez, J. I., & Santiago, J. (2018). The Interactive Origin of Iconicity. Cognitive Science, 42, 334-349. doi:10.1111/cogs.12497.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002D-42B9-8
Abstract
We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of (a) participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and (b) individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection (as opposed to by guided variation).