Cognitive influences in language evolution:Psycholinguistic predictors of loan word borrowing

Languages change due to social, cultural, and cognitive influences. In this paper, we provide an assessment of these cognitive influences on diachronic change in the vocabulary. Previously, tests of stability and change of vocabulary items have been conducted on small sets of words where diachronic change is imputed from cladistics studies. Here, we show for a substantially larger set of words that stability and change in terms of documented borrowings of words into English and into Dutch can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties of words that reflect their representational fidelity. We found that grammatical category, word length, age of acquisition, and frequency predict borrowing rates, but frequency has a non-linear relationship. Frequency correlates negatively with probability of borrowing for high-frequency words, but positively for low-frequency words. This borrowing evidence documents recent, observable diachronic change in the vocabulary enabling us to distinguish between change associated with transmission during language acquisition and change due to innovations by proficient speakers

Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment

If the structure of language vocabularies mirrors the structure of natural divisions that are universally perceived, then the meanings of words in different languages should closely align. By contrast, if shared word meanings are a product of shared culture, history and geography, they may differ between languages in substantial but predictable ways. Here, we analysed the semantic neighbourhoods of 1,010 meanings in 41 languages. The most-aligned words were from semantic domains with high internal structure (number, quantity and kinship). Words denoting natural kinds, common actions and artefacts aligned much less well. Languages that are more geographically proximate, more historically related and/or spoken by more-similar cultures had more aligned word meanings. These results provide evidence that the meanings of common words vary in ways that reflect the culture, history and geography of their users

Improving video game conversations with trope-informed design

This paper examines tropes in video games pertaining to conversations between player characters and Non-Player Characters (NPCs). Drawing from the fields of pragmatics and Conversation Analysis we show how these tropes differ from real, face-to-face conversations. We demonstrate how politeness theory (how to avoid unsociable, face-threatening behaviour) can help us understand when and why conversations with NPCs disrupt player immersion. Based on these insights we propose alternative designs to improve immersion. We call this approach Trope-Informed Design: tropes are tools that can make or break a player’s experience. Considering how and when to perpetuate, subvert, or transcend tropes can help guide designers in improving their game mechanics

Not when but whether: modality and future time reference in English and Dutch

Previous research on linguistic relativity and economic decisions hypothesized that speakers of languages with obligatory tense marking of future time reference (FTR) should value future rewards less than speakers of languages which permit present tense FTR. This was hypothesized on the basis of obligatory linguistic marking (e.g., will) causing speakers to construe future events as more temporally distal and thereby to exhibit increased “temporal discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the delay until they will occur increases. However, several aspects of this hypothesis are incomplete. First, it overlooks the role of “modal” FTR structures which encode notions about the likelihood of future outcomes (e.g., might). This may influence “probability discounting”: the subjective devaluation of outcomes as the probability of their occurrence decreases. Second, the extent to which linguistic structures are subjectively related to temporal or probability discounting differences is currently unknown. To address these, we elicited FTR language and subjective ratings of temporal distance and probability from speakers of English, which exhibits strongly grammaticized FTR, and Dutch, which does not. Several findings went against the predictions of the previous hypothesis: Framing an FTR statement in the present (“Ellie arrives later on”) versus the future tense (“…will arrive…”) did not affect ratings of temporal distance; English speakers rated future statements as relatively more temporally proximal than Dutch speakers; and English and Dutch speakers rated future tenses as encoding high certainty, which suggests that obligatory future tense marking might result in less discounting. Additionally, compared with Dutch speakers, English speakers used more low‐certainty terms in general (e.g., may) and as a function of various experimental factors. We conclude that the prior cross‐linguistic observations of the link between FTR and psychological discounting may be caused by the connection between low‐certainty modal structures and probability discounting, rather than future tense and temporality

Iconicity and diachronic language change

Iconicity, the resemblance between the form of a word and its meaning, has effects on behaviour in both communicative symbol development and language learning experiments. These results have invited speculation about iconicity being a key feature of the origins of language, yet, the presence of iconicity in natural languages seems limited. In a diachronic study of language change, we investigated the extent to which iconicity is a stable property of vocabulary, alongside previously investigated psycholinguistic predictors of change. Analysing 784 English words with data on their historical forms, we found that stable words are higher in iconicity, longer in length, and earlier acquired during development, but that the role of frequency and grammatical category may be less important than previously suggested. Iconicity is revealed as a feature of ultra-conserved words, and potentially also as a property of vocabulary early in the history of language origins

Double-blind reviewing and gender biases at EvoLang conferences

A previous study of reviewing at the Evolution of Language conferences found effects that suggested that gender bias against female authors was alleviated under double-blind review at EvoLang 11. We update this analysis in two specific ways. First, we add data from the most recent EvoLang 12 conference, providing a comprehensive picture of the conference over five iterations. Like EvoLang 11, EvoLang 12 used double-blind review, but EvoLang 12 showed no significant difference in review scores between genders. We discuss potential explanations for why there was a strong effect in EvoLang 11, which is largely absent in EvoLang 12. These include testing whether readability differs between genders, though we find no evidence to support this. Although gender differences seem to have declined for EvoLang 12, we suggest that double-blind review provides a more equitable evaluation process

Language in Economics and Accounting Research: The Role of Linguistic History

This paper investigates whether a consideration of linguistic history is important when studying the relationship between economic and linguistic behaviors. Several recent economic studies have suggested that differences between languages can affect the way people think and behave (linguistic relativity or Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). For example, the way a language obliges one to talk about the future might influence intertemporal decisions, such as a company’s earnings management. However, languages have historical relations that lead to shared features—they do not constitute independent observations. This can inflate correlations between variables if not dealt with appropriately (Galton’s problem). We discuss this problem and provide an overview of the latest methods to control linguistic history. We then provide an empirical demonstration of how Galton’s problem can bias results in an investigation of whether a company’s earnings management behavior is predicted by structural features of its employees’ language. We find a strong relationship when not controlling linguistic history, but the relationship disappears when controls are applied. In contrast, economic predictors of earnings management remain robust. Overall, our results suggest that careful consideration of linguistic history is important for distinguishing true causes from spurious correlations in economic behaviors

The Video Game Dialogue Corpus

This paper presents the Video Game Dialogue Corpus, the first large-scale, consistently coded, open source corpus of dialogue from video games. It contains over 6.2 million words of English dialogue from 50 games in the Role Playing Game (RPG) genre. This includes: games produced between 1985 and 2020; rated for children, teenagers, and adults; and in both “Western” and “Japanese” subgenres. The corpus design is described, including custom data formats for representing branching dialogue. We demonstrate the use of the corpus by comparing the dialogue of female and male characters, where we find reflections of gendered language in other media as well as patterns that seem specific to video games. We provide the source code for a “self-inflating corpus”: a pipeline that obtains the data then processes and parses it into a standard format. This makes the corpus available for teaching and research purposes, providing the first such resource for empirical analysis of video game dialogue

Hey, You! The importance of pragmatics in localizations of 'Mass Effect' in French and Spanish

The localization of video game dialog for diverse audiences is challenging because of differences in linguistic features between languages and pragmatic norms between cultures. For example, localizers must decide how to translate the English second-person singular pronoun “you” into languages that have a pragmatic distinction between formal and informal pronouns (e.g., “vous” and “tu” in French). These distinctions are used in social interaction to signal politeness, respect, and social distance, which are important elements that shape player experience in role-playing games. We analyze the dialog from French and Spanish localizations of Mass Effect and show they have strikingly different strategies for translating pronouns. French mostly uses formal pronouns while Spanish mostly uses informal pronouns. We explain how these differences affect player experience and argue that effective localization requires a clear strategy for dealing with pragmatics. We conclude by making practical suggestions for how game creators can better support localization

Emergence of systematic iconicity: transmission, interaction and analogy

Abstract Languages combine arbitrary and iconic signals. How do iconic signals emerge and when do they persist? We present an experimental study of the role of iconicity in the emergence of structure in an artificial language. Using an iterated communication game in which we control the signalling medium as well as the meaning space, we study the evolution of communicative signals in transmission chains. This sheds light on how affordances of the communication medium shape and constrain the mappability and transmissibility of form-meaning pairs. We find that iconic signals can form the building blocks for wider compositional patterns