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Linguistic communication is an intrinsically social activity that enables us to share thoughts across minds. Many complex social uses of language can be captured by domain-general representations of other minds (i.e., mentalistic representations) that externally modulate linguistic meaning through Gricean reasoning. However, here we show that representations of others’ attention are embedded within language itself. Across ten languages, we show that demonstratives—basic grammatical words (e.g., “this”/“that”) which are evolutionarily ancient, learned early in life, and documented in all known languages—are intrinsic attention tools. Beyond their spatial meanings, demonstratives encode both joint attention and the direction in which the listener must turn to establish it. Crucially, the frequency of the spatial and attentional uses of demonstratives varies across languages, suggesting that both spatial and mentalistic representations are part of their conventional meaning. Using computational modeling, we show that mentalistic representations of others’ attention are internally encoded in demonstratives, with their effect further boosted by Gricean reasoning. Yet, speakers are largely unaware of this, incorrectly reporting that they primarily capture spatial representations. Our findings show that representations of other people’s cognitive states (namely, their attention) are embedded in language and suggest that the most basic building blocks of the linguistic system crucially rely on social cognition.
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Social biases can lead to less communicatively efficient languages
Language is subject to a variety of pressures. Recent work has documented that many aspects of language structure have properties that appear to be shaped by biases for the efficient communication of semantic meaning. Other work has investigated the role of social pressures, whereby linguistic variants can acquire positive or negative evaluation based on who is perceived to be using them. While the influence of these two sets of biases on language change has been well documented, they have typically been treated separately, in distinct lines of research. We used a miniature language paradigm to test how these biases interact in language change. Specifically, we asked whether pressures to mark social meaning can lead linguistic systems to become less efficient at communicating semantic meaning. We exposed participants to a miniature language with uninformative constituent order and two dialects, one that employed case and one that did not. In the instructions, we socially biased participants toward users of the case dialect, users of the no-case dialect, or neither. Learners biased toward the no-case dialect dropped informative case, thus creating a linguistic system with high message uncertainty. They failed to compensate for this increased message uncertainty even after additional exposure to the novel language. Case was retained in all other conditions. These findings suggest that social biases not only interact with biases for efficient communication in language change but also can lead to linguistic systems that are less efficient at communicating semantic meaning.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1946882
- PAR ID:
- 10404240
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Language Acquisition
- ISSN:
- 1048-9223
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 26
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2022.2057229
