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Experimental Semiotics materials

The course in Experimental Semiotics at Tartu University (FLSE.00.303)

Experimental Semiotics course at Tartu University

Here the materials and guide for the experimental semiotics course will be posted. To be updated during the course.

For all the papers - consult the reading checklist for things to pay attention to.

Time Session Reading Extra reading
05.09.2017 What is experimental semiotics and what is it for?    
12.09.2017 Basics of experimental methods. Sani & Todman intro
APA Style notes		 Reading advice 1
Reading advice 2
26.09.2017 An overview of experimental semiotics Galantucci, Garrod, Roberts 2012 (16 pp) Scott-Phillips & Kirby 2010 (7 pp)
  Basic conceptual building blocks    
03.10.2017 Common ground in conversation Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark 1992 (12 pp)
Clark 2006 (4 pp)		  
10.10.2017 From icons to symbols Garrod et al. 2007 (22 pp) Theisen et al. 2010 (16 pp)
17.10.2017 Artificial language learning experiments Kirby, Cornish, Smith 2008 (6 pp)
Verhoef, Kirby, Padden 2011 (6 pp)		 Kirby, Griffiths, Smith 2014 (14 pp)
24.10.2017 Overview session Enfield 2003 (19 pp)  
31.10.2017 Optimization and effort in sign systems Kanwal et al. 2017 (8 pp)
Roberts & Stevens 2016 (6 pp)		  
07.11.2017 Animal culture Tennie et al. 2009 (12 pp)
Cladiere et al. 2014 (8 pp)		  
14.11.2017 Misunderstandings Either:
Galantucci & Roberts 2014 (5 pp)
Roberts, Langstein & Galantucci 2015 (8 pp)
Or:
Mills & Healey 2006 (8 pp)
Mills & Redeker 2016 (3 pp)		 Bjørndahl et al. 2015 (26 pp)
21.11.2017 Semantics and language structure Christensen et al. 2015 (14 pp) Schouwstra & de Swart 2014 (6 pp)
Winners of the vote Reading Extra
Cumulative culture and cultural complexity Caldwell & Millen 2008 (7 pp)
Caldwell & Eve 2014
Caldwell, Atkinson, Renner 2016 (9 pp)		  
Iconicity in the sign systems Cuskley, Simner, Kirby 2016 (12 pp) Tamariz et al. 2017 (16 pp)
Roberts, Lewandowski, Galantucci 2015 (15 pp)
More reading resources Reading Extra
Galantucci’s classic studies Galantucci 2009 (13 pp)
Galantucci, Kroos, Rhodes 2010 (6 pp)		  
Social learning Acerbi, Tennie, Mesoudi 2016 (11 pp)
Mesoudi 2011 (9 pp)		 Mesoudi & Whiten 2008 (13 pp)
Modalities and dimensions Little et al. 2016 (6 pp)
Little et al. 2017 (15 pp)
Verhoef, Roberts, Dingemanse 2016 (6 pp)		  
Signalling signalhood Scott-Phillips et al. 2009 (8 pp)
Scott-Phillips 2015 (6 pp)
Scott-Phillips 2016 (3 pp)		  
Systematicity Selten & Warglien 2007 (6 pp)
Theisen, Oberlander, Kirby 2010 (19 pp)		  

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References

Biblograafia
Acerbi, A., Tennie, C., & Mesoudi, A. (2016). Social learning solves the problem of narrow-peaked search landscapes: experimental evidence in humans. Royal Society Open Science, 3(9), 160215. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160215
Caldwell, C. A., Atkinson, M., & Renner, E. (2016). Experimental Approaches to Studying Cumulative Cultural Evolution. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(3), 191–195. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721416641049
Caldwell, C. A., & Eve, R. M. (2014). Persistence of Contrasting Traditions in Cultural Evolution: Unpredictable Payoffs Generate Slower Rates of Cultural Change. PLoS ONE, 9(6), e99708. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0099708
Caldwell, C. A., & Millen, A. E. (2008). Experimental models for testing hypotheses about cumulative cultural evolution. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29(3), 165–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.12.001
Christensen, P., Fusaroli, R., & Tylén, K. (2016). Environmental constraints shaping constituent order in emerging communication systems: Structural iconicity, interactive alignment and conventionalization. Cognition, 146, 67–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.09.004
Claidiere, N., Smith, K., Kirby, S., & Fagot, J. (2014). Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1797), 20141541–20141541. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1541
Cuskley, C., Simner, J., & Kirby, S. (2017). Phonological and orthographic influences in the bouba–kiki effect. Psychological Research, 81(1), 119–130. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0709-2
Fay, N., Arbib, M., & Garrod, S. (2013). How to Bootstrap a Human Communication System. Cognitive Science, 37(7), 1356–1367. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12048
Fay, N., Lister, C. J., Ellison, T. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Creating a communication system from scratch: gesture beats vocalization hands down. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00354
Galantucci, B. (2009). Experimental Semiotics: A New Approach for Studying Communication as a Form of Joint Action. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1(2), 393–410. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01027.x
Galantucci, B., Garrod, S., & Roberts, G. (2012). Experimental Semiotics: Experimental Semiotics. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6(8), 477–493. https://doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.351
Galantucci, B., & Roberts, G. (2014). Do We Notice when Communication Goes Awry? An Investigation of People’s Sensitivity to Coherence in Spontaneous Conversation. PLoS ONE, 9(7), e103182. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0103182
Garrod, S., Fay, N., Lee, J., Oberlander, J., & MacLeod, T. (2007). Foundations of representation: where might graphical symbol systems come from? Cognitive Science, 31(6), 961–987.
Enfield, N. J. (2003). Introduction. In N. J. Enfield, Linguistic epidemiology: Semantics and grammar of language contact in mainland Southeast Asia (pp. 2-44). London: Routledge Curzon
Kanwal, J., Smith, K., Culbertson, J., & Kirby, S. (2017). Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and the Principle of Least Effort: Language users optimise a miniature lexicon for efficient communication. Cognition, 165, 45–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.001
Kirby, S., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(31), 10681–10686.
Kirby, S., Griffiths, T., & Smith, K. (2014). Iterated learning and the evolution of language. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 28, 108–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2014.07.014
Little, H., Eryılmaz, K., & de Boer, B. (2015). Linguistic modality affects the creation of structure and iconicity in signals. In 37th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 1392–1398). Cognitive Science Society.
Little, H., Eryılmaz, K., & de Boer, B. (2017). Signal dimensionality and the emergence of combinatorial structure. Cognition, 168, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.06.011
Mesoudi, A. (2011). An experimental comparison of human social learning strategies: payoff-biased social learning is adaptive but underused. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32(5), 334–342. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.12.001
Mesoudi, A., & Whiten, A. (2008). The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1509), 3489–3501. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0129
Mills, G., Groningen, C., & Redeker, G. (n.d.). Amplifying signals of misunderstanding improves coordination in dialogue. FADLI 2017, 52.
Roberts, G., Langstein, B., & Galantucci, B. (2016). (In)sensitivity to incoherence in human communication. Language & Communication, 47, 15–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.11.001
Roberts, G., Lewandowski, J., & Galantucci, B. (2015). How communication changes when we cannot mime the world: Experimental evidence for the effect of iconicity on combinatoriality. Cognition, 141, 52–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.001
Roberts, G., & Stevens, J. S. (n.d.). Information theoretic factors in marking linguistic focus: A laboratory-language approach.
Schouwstra, M., & de Swart, H. (2014). The semantic origins of word order. Cognition, 131(3), 431–436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.03.004
Scott-Phillips, T. C. (2015). What is art? A pragmatic perspective. Think, 14(40), 87–91. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175615000093
Scott-Phillips, T. C. (2016). Meaning in great ape communication: summarising the debate. Animal Cognition, 19(1), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0936-3
Scott-Phillips, T. C., & Kirby, S. (2010). Language evolution in the laboratory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(9), 411–417. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.006
Scott-Phillips, T. C., Kirby, S., & Ritchie, G. R. S. (2009). Signalling signalhood and the emergence of communication. Cognition, 113(2), 226–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.08.009
Selten, R., & Warglien, M. (2007). The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(18), 7361–7366.
Tamariz, M., & Kirby, S. (2015). Culture: Copying, Compression, and Conventionality. Cognitive Science, 39(1), 171–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12144
Tamariz, M., Kirby, S., & Carr, J. W. (2016). Cultural evolution across domains: language, technology and art. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cogn. Sci. Soc. In press Austin, TX.
Tamariz, M., Roberts, S. G., Martínez, J. I., & Santiago, J. (2017). The Interactive Origin of Iconicity. Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12497
Tennie, C., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1528), 2405–2415. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0052
The effects of rapidity of fading on communication systems. (2010). Interaction Studies, 11(1), 100–111. https://doi.org/10.1075/is.11.1.03gal
Theisen, C. A., Oberlander, J., & Kirby, S. (2010). Systematicity and arbitrariness in novel communication systems. Interaction Studies, 11(1), 14–32.
Verhoef, T., Kirby, S., & de Boer, B. (2013). Combinatorial structure and iconicity in artificial whistled languages. In CogSci.
Verhoef, T., Roberts, S. G., & Dingemanse, M. (2015). Emergence of systematic iconicity: Transmission, interaction and analogy. In 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 2481–2486). Cognitive Science Society.
Verhof, T., Kirby, S., & Padden, C. (2011). Cultural emergence of combinatorial structure in an artificial whistled language. In Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 33).