Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Lauren Fletcher (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Communicative efficiency, linguistic regularisation and language change in autistic people

Abstract: Language evolution research has not yet considered the contributions to language change made by neurodivergent people, who are often active members of their language communities. In our work, we aim to change this, and contribute to accounting for true cognitive diversity in cognitive science beyond neurotypical variation. First, I discuss the motivations behind pursuing this paradigm, and our choice of autistic people as a case study. Second, I present the results of a study that demonstrates that autistic people display an oft-cited trade-off between communicative accuracy and production effort, but they are willing to put in more production effort to meet social goals, which could contribute to the retention of redundant forms in language (Fletcher et al., 2023). Then, I present preliminary results of a study that seeks to establish whether autistic behaviours can drive language change in the broader population, by considering the case of asymmetric accommodation in linguistic regularisation. Finally, I discuss the next steps of the project, in which we aim to give more direct evidence of autistic-driven language change and innovation in the lab.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

• Elizabeth Pankratz

• Centre for Language Evolution