Cat will be giving a talk on her latest experiments: “The effects of communication on category structure”, Tuesday 30th April, 11am, DSB 1.17. Abstract below.

“The effects of communication on category structure”

Words divide the world into labeled categories. Languages vary in the categories they label, sometimes to the point of making cross-cutting divisions of the same space. A potential reason for this is that linguistic categories are constructed partly via communication. Previous work suggests two opposing hypotheses about how communication might contribute to category structure: 1) communication aligns individuals’ categories, creating one of a number of optimally shareable category structures (Freyd, 1983; Gärdenfors, 2000); 2) languages’ category structures diverge from an underlying shared similarity space in ways that are not necessarily optimal, but depend on the history of communicative conventions in that particular language (Malt, Sloman, & Gennari, 1999). In the current study, participants categorise images drawn from a continuous space in three conditions: 1) a whole-set non-communicative condition, where individual participants view the whole set of images and divide it into labelled categories on the basis of similarity; 2) a communicative condition, where pairs of participants create categories by playing a partnered communication game; 3) a serial non-communicative condition, where individual participants label images serially under the same memory constraints as the participants in the communicative condition. The results show that communication creates a pressure for specificity, with participants producing more categories in the communicative condition than either of the non-communicative conditions. Although equally sized categories would be most optimal for communication, both the serial non-communicative condition and the communicative condition produce more unequally sized categories than those of non-communicative participants who labeled the whole set at once. Finally, participants in both the communicative and the whole-set non-communicative conditions have more closely aligned category systems than those in the serial non-communicative condition. Taken together, the results support different aspects of each of the two hypotheses outlined above. While individuals may share basic similarity perception of a space, the memory constraints imposed by serial encounters with objects from this space lead to idiosyncratic categorisation systems that do not necessarily divide the space up optimally. However, communication works to bring these idiosyncratic non-optimal category structures into closer alignment.

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