Brain responses to a lab-evolved artificial language with space-time metaphors

Cognition, vol. 246, pp. 105763

Abstract

What is the connection between the cultural evolution of a language and the rapid processing response to that language in the brains of individual learners? In an iterated communication study that was conducted previously, participants were asked to communicate temporal concepts such as "tomorrow," "day after," "year," and "past" using vertical movements recorded on a touch screen. Over time, participants developed simple artificial 'languages' that used space metaphorically to communicate in nuanced ways about time. Some conventions appeared rapidly and universally (e.g., using larger vertical movements to convey greater temporal durations). Other conventions required extensive social interaction and exhibited idiosyncratic variation (e.g., using vertical location to convey past or future). Here we investigate whether the brain's response during acquisition of such a language reflects the process by which the language's conventions originally evolved. We recorded participants' EEG as they learned one of these artificial space-time languages. Overall, the brain response to this artificial communication system was language-like, with, for instance, violations to the system's conventions eliciting an N400-like component. Over the course of learning, participants' brain responses developed in ways that paralleled the process by which the language had originally evolved, with early neural sensitivity to violations of a rapidly-evolving universal convention, and slowly developing neural sensitivity to an idiosyncratic convention that required slow social negotiation to emerge. This study opens up exciting avenues of future work to disentangle how neural biases influence learning and transmission in the emergence of structure in language.

Authors 4

1. Tessa Verhoef corresponding Aachen Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science

   Leiden University · University of California San Diego

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Gorlaeus Building, Einsteinweg 55, 2333 CC Leiden, the Netherlands; Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, Mail Code 0515; 9500, Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA. Electronic address: t.verhoef@liacs.leidenuniv.nl

   9500, Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA

   Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, Mail Code 0515

   Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Gorlaeus Building, Einsteinweg 55, 2333 CC Leiden, the Netherlands

2. Tyler Marghetis

   University of California, Merced

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced, 5200 North Lake Rd., Merced, CA 95343, USA

3. Esther J. Walker

   University of California San Diego

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, Mail Code 0515; 9500, Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA

   9500, Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA

   Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, Mail Code 0515

4. Seana Coulson

   University of California San Diego

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, Mail Code 0515; 9500, Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA

   9500, Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, USA

   Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, Mail Code 0515