Abstract
Psychological experiments have revealed that in normal visual perception of humans, color cues are more salient than shape cues, which are more salient than textural patterns. We carried out an artificial language learning experiment to study whether such perceptual saliency hierarchy (color > shape > texture) influences the learning of orders regulating adjectives of involved visual features in a manner either congruent (expressing a salient feature in a salient part of the form) or incongruent (expressing a salient feature in a less salient part of the form) with that hierarchy. Results showed that within a few rounds of learning participants could learn the compositional segments encoding the visual features and the order between them, generalize the learned knowledge to unseen instances with the same or different orders, and show learning biases for orders that are congruent with the perceptual saliency hierarchy. Although the learning performances for both the biased and unbiased orders became similar given more learning trials, our study confirms that this type of individual perceptual constraint could contribute to the structural configuration of language, and points out that such constraint, as well as other factors, could collectively affect the structural diversity in languages.
Highlights
Physical objects can be discriminated by visual features such as color, shape, and texture
Given the PSH, an interesting question arises: Whether the PSH can cast any influence on learning or processing the language structures used to regulate the relevant adjectives of those visual features
We evaluated whether the perceptual constraint regarding the saliency hierarchy of the basic visual features affects the learnability of ordering structures between the segments encoding such features in an artificial language
Summary
Physical objects can be discriminated by visual features such as color, shape, and texture. Given the PSH, an interesting question arises: Whether the PSH can cast any influence on learning or processing the language structures used to regulate the relevant adjectives of those visual features Answer to this question helps reveal the relationship between structural configuration in language and perceptual or cognitive constraints in humans, which is a challenging issue in modern psychology and linguistics (Christiansen and Kirby, 2003; Gentner and Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Hurford, 2007, 2012). Other simulations illustrate that the universal color naming patterns in the worldās languages could result from the perceptual constraint of human eyes towards colors, which takes effect during cultural transmission of color terms (Baronchelli et al, 2012) These studies have illustrated the effect of perceptual or cognitive constraints on structural configuration of language (Heine and Kuteva, 2008; Chater et al, 2009; Mesoudi, 2011; Richerson and Christiansen, 2013). We described the experiment, reported its results, and discussed the relation between language and human cognition based on this study
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