ABSTRACT

Artificial language games give researchers the opportunity to investigate the emergence and evolution of semantic structure, i.e. the organisation of meaning spaces into discrete categories. A possible issue with this approach is that categories mightcarry over from participants’ native languages, a potential bias that has mostly been ignored. In a referential communication game, we compare colour terms from three different languages to those of an artificial language. We assess the similarity of the semantic structures and test the influence of the semantic structure on artificial language communication by comparing to a separate online naming task providing us with the native language semantic structure. Our results show that native and artificial language structures overlap at least moderately. Furthermore, communicative behaviour and performance were influenced by the shared semantic structure, but only for English-speaking pairs. These results imply a cognitive link between participants’ semantic structures and artificial language structure formation.

摘要

人工语言游戏为研究人员提供了研究语义结构（即将意义空间组织为离散类​​别）的机会。这种方法的一个可能问题是类别可能会从参与者的母语中继承下来，这种潜在的偏见已被大多数人忽略。在参照通信游戏中，我们将三种不同语言的颜色术语与人工语言的颜色术语进行比较。通过与为我们提供母语语义结构的单独的在线命名任务进行比较，我们评估了语义结构的相似性，并测试了语义结构对人工语言交流的影响。我们的结果表明，母语和人工语言结构至少适度重叠。此外，交流行为和表现受共享语义结构的影响，但仅适用于英语对。这些结果暗示了参与者的语义结构和人工语言结构形成之间的认知联系。