A Topic on Social Psychology
Language Evolution in the Laboratory: The Interactive Evolution of Human Communication Systems

Abstract
Language is such an important human characteristic that scientists and philosophers have long contemplated how it first came into existence and how it reached its present form. The problem for those interested in language origin and evolution is that the earliest communication systems left no trace. To overcome this lack of 'linguistic fossils' we have participants play a communication game that prohibits the use of conventional language (think of Pictionary and Charades). Playing the game forces participants to create a shared communication system from scratch, recreating a historical record under controlled laboratory conditions. This approach allows us to experimentally investigate the factors that are critical to the origin and evolution of human communication systems. This talk will stress the importance of iconicity to the grounding of shared sign-meaning mappings, and the role of interaction to the evolution of shared symbolic communication systems.

Speaker
Nicolas Fay is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology, University of Western Australia (UWA). He earned his PhD in psychology at the University of Glasgow in 2000. Nicholas joined UWA in 2004, after working as a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, and then as a research scientist at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan. His research focuses on the priciples underlying human communication. Current work examines the origin and evolution of human communication systems.