Investigating the Influence of Language Evolution on Perception of a Continuous Meaning Space
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Date
24/11/2010Item status
Restricted AccessAuthor
Swoboda, Kate
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Abstract
There has been a recent resurgence in psycholinguistic experimental studies testing linguistic
relativity – the view, associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), that the language we speak
influences our perception and understanding of the environment. Furthermore, recent experimental
work in evolutionary linguistics in the Iterated Learning Model applied to humans (e.g., Kirby,
Cornish, & Smith, 2008) has proved to be successful at explaining how language transmission can
shape its properties. In light of these findings, the research presented here unprecedentedly embarks
on testing linguistic relativity from an evolutionary perspective. It is demonstrated that language
transmission of two qualitatively different languages evolved in the experiment by Matthews, Kirby,
& Cornish (in prep.) – one that promotes the distinction between rotated and unrotated shapes and the
other that does not – influences perception of these shapes. This finding suggests that language
evolution shapes the conceptual system (semantics) in the speakers’ minds by propagating the ways
the world should be perceived and interpreted within a given speech community.