Time: 4pm (to 6 pm) CET

Meeting ID: 920 5227 9253

Passcode:  193807

Chair: Christophe Heintz 

Title: How well designed are languages and other tools for communication?

Abstract: 

A fruitful framework in cognitive science studies communication systems as a well-designed and efficient tool for communication. In this view, several features of language and other communication systems (non-human communication, non-lingustic codes, etc.) can be explained as adaptive solutions to the challenges of information transmission. Famous examples include the law of abbreviation, showing that frequent words or signals tend to be short or simple, saving cognitive and articulatory costs; or the combinatoriality of signals, whereby words and phonemes (but also other signals and their components) are made up from combinations of discrete elements or features, making symbols distinctive and numerous but still easy to store and produce. I will argue that this "efficient design" view of communication systems is incomplete at best. It lacks a mechanistic foundation—some account of how communication systems came to be efficiently designed. It lacks credible null hypotheses telling us what communication look like if it were not efficiently designed. I will illustrate this point with two studies. The first considers the law of abbreviation. This law, as it occurs in natural languages, fails to satisfy the prediction of the standard, efficiency-based account, inherited from Zipf. It is systematically weak, and always accompanied by heteroskedasticity. I propose a cultural evolutionary account that explains these features of the law of abbreviation, and the law itself, without assuming any selection for efficient communication. The second study looks at combinatoriality in letters. Like the sounds of languages, letter shapes combine distinct features to create multiple shapes (like the arch in n and m, or the vertical stroke in q,p,d,b). Yet, data from a broad comparative survey of letter shapes in 43 writing systems shows writing to be much less combinatorial than speech. Combinatoriality, thus, is not the only way for a communication system to create numerous, distinctive symbols. These two studies illustrate an approach of the evolution of communication systems where the need for communicative efficiency is acknowledged but not taken as a sufficient explanation. Languages and other communication systems evolved under a pressure for efficiency, but they do not always comply with it, or they may comply in unpredictable ways.

Best regards,

Fanni

 

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FANNI TAKÁTSY   

Lab Manager/Research Coordinator, 

Social Mind Center

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CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY

Quellenstrasse 51. | 1100 Vienna, Austria

takatsyf@ceu.edu 

http://socialmind.ceu.edu/

http://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/

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