Abstract
ABSTRACT Artificial language games give researchers the opportunity to investigate the emergence and evolution of semantic structure, i.e. the organisation of meaning spaces into discrete categories. A possible issue with this approach is that categories mightcarry over from participants’ native languages, a potential bias that has mostly been ignored. In a referential communication game, we compare colour terms from three different languages to those of an artificial language. We assess the similarity of the semantic structures and test the influence of the semantic structure on artificial language communication by comparing to a separate online naming task providing us with the native language semantic structure. Our results show that native and artificial language structures overlap at least moderately. Furthermore, communicative behaviour and performance were influenced by the shared semantic structure, but only for English-speaking pairs. These results imply a cognitive link between participants’ semantic structures and artificial language structure formation.
Highlights
One striking feature of human language is that it exhibits structure on a variety of levels (Everaert et al, 2015)
We investigate the evolution of the semantic structure of color terms in an artificial language game, namely an online smartphone application called the “Color Game”
We investigated the semantic structure of an artificial language that participants evolved by communicating colors, and compared it to the respective native language structure of speakers of English, German, and French
Summary
One striking feature of human language is that it exhibits structure on a variety of levels (Everaert et al, 2015). A limited number of phonological units that are meaningless by themselves are combined into a much higher number of meaningful words (duality of patterning: Hockett, 1960); morphemes (single units of meaning) combine to form more complex phrases; and the semantic space is organized into discrete categories that allow us to structure and successfully communicate an otherwise intractable and infinite number of meanings (Lakoff, 1987). Different objects that can be designated by the term “furniture” can be distinguished in English using words such as “chair”, “table”, “sofa”, or “bed” This is based on the respective features of the objects, like their physical properties and usage (e.g. a chair is used for sitting, while a table is typically used to place objects rather than humans on it; there can still be overlap in properties like having four legs, being made of wood, etc.). Another example would be the domain of color: Here, discrete color terms like “red” or “green”, and “crimson” or “steel-blue”, structure the entire space of colors perceivable by humans to make them communicable to others
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