Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Asha Sato (CLE, University of Edinburgh)

Title: The role of expectation and experience in the perception of iconicity

Abstract: Iconicity (a perceived resemblance between a communicative form and meaning) is generally accepted to be a subjective phenomenon: people do not always agree whether (or how) a particular item is iconic. One of the things that might influence how potentially iconic items are construed is previous experience and expectations produced by that experience (with one’s own language, or with iconicity). I will present an experiment using a novel artificial language modality based on point patterns, designed to test whether we can induce an expectation for iconicity in the lab and whether that expectation affects the perception of iconicity in new items. We find that participants trained on an iconic language are more likely to select an iconic label for novel ambiguous items than participants trained on an arbitrary language.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Andres Karjus

Centre for Language Evolution