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{
    "pk": 27787,
    "title": "Emerging abstractions: Lexical conventions are shaped by communicative context",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Words exist for referring at many levels of specificity: from\nthe broadest (thing) to the most specific (Fido). What drives\nthe emergence of these taxonomies of reference? Recent com-\nputational theories of language evolution suggest that commu-\nnicative demands of the environment may play a deciding role.\nHere, we investigate local pragmatic mechanisms of lexical\nadaptation that may undergird global emergence by manipulat-\ning context in a repeated reference game where pairs of partic-\nipants interactively coordinate on an artificial communication\nsystem. We hypothesize that pairs should converge on specific\nnames (e.g. Fido) when the context requires frequently mak-\ning fine distinctions between entities; conversely, they should\nconverge on a more compressed system of conventions for ab-\nstract categories (e.g. dog) in coarser contexts, even if a finer\nmapping would be sufficient. We show differences in the lev-\nels of abstraction that emerged in different environments and\nintroduce a statistical approach to probe the dynamics of emer-\ngence.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Convention"
        },
        {
            "word": "Pragmatics"
        },
        {
            "word": "Communication"
        },
        {
            "word": "interaction"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Publication-based-Talks",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/81s4d7fv",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Robert",
            "middle_name": "X.D.",
            "last_name": "Hawkins",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Michael",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Franke",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Tubingen",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Kenny",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Smith",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Edinburgh",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Noah",
            "middle_name": "D",
            "last_name": "Goodman",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2018-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27787/galley/17427/download/"
        }
    ]
}