Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many of the issues that confront designers of interactive computer systems ako appear in natural language evolution. Natural languages and human-computer interfaces share as their primary mission the support of extended "dialogues" between responsive entities. Because in each case one participant is a human being, some of the pressures operating on natural languages, causing them to evolve in order to better support such dialogue, also operate on human-computer "languages" or interfaces. This does not necessarily push interfaces in the direction of natural language— since one entity in this dialogue is not a human, this is not to be expected. Nonetheless, by discerning where the pressures that guide natural language evolution also appear in human-computer interaction, we can contribute to the design of computer systems and obtain a new perspective on natural languages.