AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH TO SPEAKERS' PERSPECTIVES IN A PAIRED WALL GAME

Abstract

A new interactive "wall game" is proposed to study the emergence of rules and symbols in interaction dynamics. In this game, two human players alternately configure a pattern on a board to communicate with each other. Distinct from related studies, players in this game have no explicit game scores or tasks to optimize. Any dynamics occurring in this game are therefore ad-hoc and on-going processes. There were three major findings in this paper. (i) The subjects mainly interacted in two modes: a dynamic mode where players proceed through the game without assigning any meanings to the pattern, and a metaphoric mode, where players process with narrative reflection. (ii) Subjects spontaneously switch between the two modes, but this switching is suppressed when playing alone. (iii) A transition diagram of the board pattern can be used to label the two modes, e.g. linearity of the diagram is correlated with the metaphoric mode. One of the main features of grammar is to display subjects' intentionality in a systematic way. We argue that the switching between the two modes observed in our experiment can be taken as a grammatical aspect that emerged in the process. These modes express the speaker's perspective in the same manner as grammatical elements do in natural language. The switching behavior should be seen as a process that embodies a player's intention using the medium (in this case, the patterns in the wall game), and a player's exploration of the medium is a necessary step before generating a grammar structure.