Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Julian Jara-Ettinger (Yale University)

Title: The social basis of referential communication

Abstract: Human communication is an intrinsically social activity where we share our thoughts through sounds and movements. Accordingly, theoretical work has long argued that this capacity must rely on commonsense psychology—our ability to understand other people’s behavior in terms of unobservable mental states. Yet, classical empirical work suggests that the interaction between commonsense psychology and communication is surprisingly limited. In this talk, I will present two studies where we use computational models of communication to test the extent to which communication might rely on commonsense psychology. Our work suggests that traces of social reasoning appear even in one of the most basic forms of communication: reference. Moreover, these models diverge from, and systematically outperform, non-social communicative models that rely on an assumption of brevity in speech.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Henry Conklin

Centre for Language Evolution