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1. What we talk about when we talk about colors

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109237118  

   Twomey, Colin R.; Roberts, Gareth; Brainard, David H.; Plotkin, Joshua B. (September 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Names for colors vary widely across languages, but color categories are remarkably consistent. Shared mechanisms of color perception help explain consistent partitions of visible light into discrete color vocabularies. But the mappings from colors to words are not identical across languages, which may reflect communicative needs—how often speakers must refer to objects of different color. Here we quantify the communicative needs of colors in 130 different languages by developing an inference algorithm for this problem. We find that communicative needs are not uniform: Some regions of color space exhibit 30-fold greater demand for communication than other regions. The regions of greatest demand correlate with the colors of salient objects, including ripe fruits in primate diets. Our analysis also reveals a hidden diversity in the communicative needs of colors across different languages, which is partly explained by differences in geographic location and the local biogeography of linguistic communities. Accounting for language-specific, nonuniform communicative needs improves predictions for how a language maps colors to words, and how these mappings vary across languages. Our account closes an important gap in the compression theory of color naming, while opening directions to study cross-cultural variation in the need to communicate different colors and its impact on the cultural evolution of color categories. 

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2. Using teacher talk moves to help students talk like scientists

   Wray, K. A. (December 2022, The Science teacher)
3. Talk Is Cheap

   https://doi.org/10.37282/991819.20.42  

   Berent, Iris (September 2020, Inference: International Review of Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Speech and language are so tightly linked that they are often considered inseparable. But what of sign language? Iris Berent sheds light on this oft-neglected branch of linguistics, which may hold the key to disrupting some long-held truths in the domain. While speech may be the default linguistic channel in hearing communities, language and its channel might not be one and the same. 

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4. Algorithmic Cheap Talk

   Babichenko, Yakov; Talgam-Cohen, Inbal; Xu, Haifeng; Zabarnyi, Konstantin (July 2024, Proceedings of 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2024)

   The literature on strategic communication originated with the influential cheap talk model, which precedes the Bayesian persuasion model by three decades. This model describes an interaction between two agents: sender and receiver. The sender knows some state of the world which the receiver does not know, and tries to influence the receiver’s action by communicating a cheap talk message to the receiver. This paper initiates the algorithmic study of cheap talk in a finite environment (i.e., a finite number of states and receiver’s possible actions). We first prove that approximating the sender-optimal or the welfare-maximizing cheap talk equilibrium up to a certain additive constant or multiplicative factor is NP-hard. Fortunately, we identify three naturally-restricted cases that admit efficient algorithms for finding a sender-optimal equilibrium. These include a state-independent sender’s utility structure, a constant number of states or a receiver having only two actions. 

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5. What do Biomedical Engineering Faculty Talk About When They Talk About Ethics?

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342994  

   Fila, Nicholas D; Hess, Justin L; Brightman, Andrew O (October 2023, IEEE)