Environmental Constraints on Cultural Conventions: A Case Study of Linguistic Coordination in Joint Problem Solving
Authors: Nölle Jonas 
Published: September 2019

According to Lewis (1969), conventions are solutions to recurrent problems that we use to solve co-ordination problems. This can be extended to all kinds of behaviour – e.g., different societies established left-hand or right-hand traffic to organize transportation. However, for social groups living in different environments these coordination problems might vary and call for different solutions. It is therefore not surprising that populations in different climate zones invented different hunting or housing styles. In my thesis, I investigated whether this kind of adaptation is also true for a more immaterial kind of cultural practice: Linguistic conventions. Language plays a predominant role in social interactions where communities of agents face collective problems (Tylén et al., 2010). In their Interactive Alignment Model, Pickering and Garrod (2004) propose that speakers engaged in a joint activity automatically align their language for the purpose of solving the task. In experiments, it could be shown how this leads to the emergence and stabilization of shared, task-specific linguis-tic routines (e.g., Garrod &amp; Doherty, 1994). In such interactive usage situations, the task environment provides agents with a set of affordances that call for different types of actions (Gibson, 2013). From this follows the prediction that different communicative strategies will evolve adaptively in response to varying environmental affordances. The hypothesis was addressed in an experiment, where subjects had to communicate positions to guide each other through virtual mazes. In three conditions, these varied in their layout (e.g., being highly regular or resembling figural shapes) and afforded different conceptual strategies. As predicted, different linguistic strategies became routinized in response to these environmental conditions. This suggests that linguistic interactions and routines are not only the result of automatic priming mechanisms as suggested in the Interactive Alignment Model. Rather, linguistic adaptations between interlocutors are highly sensitive to factors of the shared task environment. This complements recent empirical findings suggesting correlations between linguistic features and ecology (e.g., Everett, Blasi &amp; Roberts, 2015; Majid et al., 2004). It is therefore conceivable that grammars – grounded in social interaction – just like routines in an existing language, are also motivated by external factors. Lastly, possible future experiments that rely on virtual reality paradigms to assess this role of the environment in cultural language evolution were discussed.ReferencesEverett, C., Blasi, D. E., &amp; Roberts, S. G. (2015). Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201417413.Garrod, S., &amp; Doherty, G. (1994). Conversation, co-ordination and convention: An empirical investigation of how groups establish linguistic conventions. Cognition, 53(3), 181-215.Gibson, J. J. (2013). The ecological approach to visual perception. Psychology Press.Lewis, D. K. (1969). Convention: A philosophical study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Majid, A., Bowerman, M., Kita, S., Haun, D., &amp; Levinson, S. C. (2004). Can language restructure cognition? The case for space. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(3), 108–114.Pickering, M. J., &amp; Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and brain sciences, 27(02), 169–190.Tylén, K., Weed, E., Wallentin, M., Roepstorff, A., &amp; Frith, C. D. (2010). Language as a tool for interacting minds. Mind &amp; Language, 25(1), 3-29.