Communicative factors in the emergence of phonological dispersion
Abstract
We investigated the emergence of dispersion in phonological systems using an established experimental paradigm in which pairs of participants play a non-linguistic communication game, taking turns to select discrete colors from a continuous underlying space and send them to each other to communicate animal silhouettes. Over time participants established sets of signals made up of combinatorial color units, analogous to the phonemes of natural language. This allowed us to investigate the role of interactive pressures on the emergence of organizational structure in phonological inventories, principally dispersion. We manipulated minimum signal length (as a means of investigating the role of coarticulation) and the presence of probabilistic noise. We also manipulated the nature of the underlying color space. There was an effect of colorspace but not of noise or minimum signal-length. However, dispersion occurred at above-chance levels in all conditions. Our results provide evidence for the role of communicative interaction in the emergence and cultural evolution of phonological structure.