An integrative study on the process and mechanism of the co-creation of symbolic communication systems

Takashi Hashimoto
School of Knowledge Science
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
hash@jaist.ac.jp


   Human languages have different characters from the communication systems of other animals, e.g., complex syntactic rules, diversified vocabularies, communication of intentions. In this talk, at first, I will introduce the basics of evolutionary linguistics. In this field, researches study scientifically the evidences, processes, and mechanisms of the origin and evolution of human language. The origin of language is biological evolutionary processes in which cognitive abilities for language emerged and evolved. The evolution of language is cultural evolutionary processes of the complexification and structuralization of linguistic knowledge and language structures.
   Then, I will show our recent study on the co-creation process of symbolic communication systems. In this study, we take an integrative approach of different methodologies, i.e., cognitive experiment (experimental semiotics), constructive approach (ACT-R simulation), and brain measurement (EEG). The body of this study is a cognitive experiment, where participants engaged in a coordination game with symbolic massage exchange make a shared system to communication connotations (intention) in addition to denotations (reference). By analyzing the experimental results, we found that the formation process of symbolic communication systems consisted of three scaffolding stages: building common ground (sub-symbolic pragmatics), sharing a symbol system (semantics and syntax), and forming a role division (pragmatics). I will discuss the mechanism to co-create the communication system based on the obtained results from three methodologies above mentioned. The ingredients in the mechanism are the regularities in the symbol use and behavior, role-reversal imitation, symbol systems with low ambiguity, and the awareness of others.