New languages emerge through interactions among people, yet the role of social network structure in language emergence is not clear, despite research from experimental semiotics, observational fieldwork, and computational modeling. To better understand the effects of social network structure on the formation of conventional referring expressions, we use a silent gesture paradigm that combines the methodological control of experimental semiotics and computational simulations with the naturalistic affordances of the human body, physical environment, and interpersonal communication. We elicited gestural referring expressions from hearing participants randomly assigned to either a richly- or sparsely-connected communicative network. Results demonstrate greater conventionalization among participants in the richly-connected condition, although this effect disappears after accounting for between-condition differences in overall number of communicative interactions. These results provide the first experimental demonstration that communicative network structure causally impacts the conventionalization of referring expressions in human participants, using a communicative modality in which human language naturally arises.

新语言是通过人与人之间的互动而出现的，但是尽管来自实验符号学，观察性实地​​考察和计算模型的研究仍不清楚社交网络结构在语言出现中的作用。为了更好地理解社交网络结构对传统指称表达形式的影响，我们使用了一种无声手势范例，该范例将实验符号学和计算模拟的方法学控制与人体，自然环境和人际交往的自然表现相结合。我们从随机分配给富裕或稀疏连接的通信网络的听觉参与者中得出手势指称表达。结果表明，在紧密联系的条件下，参与者之间的惯例更为紧密，尽管在考虑了交流互动的整体数量之间的条件差异之后，这种影响消失了。这些结果提供了第一个实验证明，即使用自然会出现人类语言的交流方式，交流网络的结构会因果关系影响人类参与者中指称表达的常规性。