{"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/"}]}