tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4297242917419089261.post450097351453232996..comments2024-03-09T01:05:10.754-08:00Comments on Babies Learning Language: What's the relationship between language and thought? The Optimal Semantic Expressivity HypothesisMichael Frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00681533046507717821noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4297242917419089261.post-68904077735286554682017-07-31T21:21:53.407-07:002017-07-31T21:21:53.407-07:00Now to relate these ideas to the semantic expressi...Now to relate these ideas to the semantic expressivity hypothesis (OSE). <br /><br />Sticking with the domain of color, I take Regier et al’s work (also work by Baronchelli et al., and earlier work by Batali) as all showing that the shape of lexicalized color categories is not arbitrary but rather reflects an optimal or near-optimal solution for some task. I like this line of thinking, but the question that immediately arises is what’s the task. Is the task to communicate about specific color hues? What determines the alternatives being discriminated? What determines the base frequencies of the alternatives?). In any case, I am fully on board with the idea that the geometry of color categories (as well as shape categories, spatial categories, etc.) is predictable and constrained by, for example, the need for the categories to be learnable and expressive. Though the latter metric is difficult to assess for the reasons already mentioned: express what exactly, to whom, and under what conditions? That caveat aside, when it comes to explaining why words generalize in the ways they do (i.e., the shape of word meanings), a focus on optimizing learnability and expressivity strikes me as correct.<br /><br />But now back to thinking about the effects of language on color cognition/perception. The questions addressed by the OSE hypothesis seem orthogonal to two central questions of most interest to people like me: First, even if one could entirely predict the geometry of a 5-color category naming system, the question still remains why languages differ in color names as much as they do. What exactly drives a language to develop color words in the first place. Second, we return to the question I started with. What is the consequence of learning color words? A child learning English is inheriting an already developed system—the English color vocabulary. What (if any) is the consequence of learning and using this system on tasks like color memory, color discrimination, color-based attention, just-noticeable-differences, etc. <br /><br />Lastly, I a quick thought on this bit:<br /><br />“For the OSE to make most of its currently testable predictions, non-linguistic representations must be shared across speakers.”<br /><br />I agree, but it’s really tough to test this if we allow the possibility that language warps “non-linguistic” representations. If using color-labels makes color representations more categorical, then in what sense can one claim that color representations of speakers of languages with different color vocabularies are shared? One could point to some task that both populations perform identically, e.g., that they have identical just-noticeable differences. But what is to say that this task is a better measure of “true” non-linguistic representations than another task on which their performance differs? An alternative is to drop the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic representations entirely and just talk about “representations” – which may or may not be affected by experience with language and/or in-the-moment use of language.<br /><br />Thanks again for a great post!<br />Gary Lupyanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03741456415328742952noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4297242917419089261.post-71537428037951998182017-07-31T21:21:29.121-07:002017-07-31T21:21:29.121-07:00Thanks for the great post Mike!
Some thoughts.
...Thanks for the great post Mike! <br /><br />Some thoughts. <br /><br />First, merely raising the issues you raise is already an improvement over the run-of-the-mill does-language-shape-thought kinds of questions. <br /><br />Here’s my own take on the language-and-thought connection and a few reactions to the semantic expressivity hypothesis.<br /><br />Learning a language is a form of experience. Many experiences have wide-ranging effects beyond a specific domain. Especially when dealing with an experience as ubiquitous as language, a question arises: what sorts of effects does learning a language have on X where X is something outside of language (though what should count as X creates some interesting circularities; how do we know whether something is “linguistic” or not?). <br /><br />Let’s take color as a test-case. As an aside, papers on language and color and language frequently talk about supporting or rejecting the Whorfian hypothesis including in the very title, even though—as far as I know as far as I know Whorf never wrote about color or even what we would now call visual perception.<br /><br />Here’s how I think of the situation.<br /><br />The human visual system is capable of distinguishing colors. That fact is independent of language or communication, though the role of visual diet in color discrimination remains an open question. I think this apparent independence between color vision and language is why there is confusion in the color psychophysics community regarding what the language people are talking about when they talk about the relationships between language and color perception.<br /><br />In the course of learning some languages, children learn to name colors. Being a fluent English speaker means knowing how to name at least the basic colors. And so we can ask: what effect is there of learning and using color names on putatively non-linguistic tasks: color perception/discrimination/memory/etc. <br /><br />We can also ask the question a slightly different way: what effect does language have on non-linguistic color representations, but for reasons that will become clear in a moment, this way of asking the question carries some strong assumptions that may be unfounded.<br /><br />As a first step toward answering the question, I find it helpful to think about how the treatment of color by languages is different from the treatment of color by the visual system. The immediate answer is that the visual system appears to code color in a continuous space (though nonlinear and nonmonotonic). In contrast, languages code colors categorically. And so one hypothesis is that in learning a color naming system, people are learning a means of activating color representations in a (more) categorical way than they would in the absence of such a system. This is not to say that language is the only route to categorical color, but it is the one that people using languages with color names routinely take. More than simply “carving up” the color space (the focus of nearly all the work on the subject), color names alert the learner to the idea that the color dimension itself is a nameable entity. The idea that the color of something can be named independently of the object is an interesting cultural innovation. It is analogous in some respects to the idea that cardinality can be named independently of the objects being enumerated. You mention in the post the often-raised question of how much participants in Kirby et al’s iterated-learning tasks depend on prior knowledge of language. The use of hard-to-name shapes doesn’t take into account that the participants have all learned to treat the typical *dimensions* of variation (e.g., color, shape, number) as nameable entities. The question of the role that language played in that achievement is an interesting one.<br /><br />[running into max comment length, so splitting into 2 comments]<br />Gary Lupyanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03741456415328742952noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4297242917419089261.post-16440343983600278512017-07-30T06:54:06.803-07:002017-07-30T06:54:06.803-07:00Thank you for this useful summary Michael.
I agre...Thank you for this useful summary Michael.<br /><br />I agree with you that (what you call) the OSE is insightful and explanatorily important, and the results you summarise do suggest that it is true. I am certainly of that view myself.<br /><br />Let me make two further points. Both broaden the issue, one theoretically, the other empirically.<br /><br />Theoretically, the OSE is / can be read as a corollary of the cognitive principle of relevance, as describe by Sperber & Wilson in Relevance: Communication & Cognition (1986/1995). The cognitive principle of relevance states that the human mind is geared towards the maximisation of relevance, where relevance is defined as the trade-off between cognitive effects on the one hand, and cognitive effort on the other. The OSE is effectively a statement that, in the domain of semantic representation, this maximisation scales up from the individual to the group/cultural level.<br /><br />I realise, of course, that Relevance Theory (RT) is not the only framework compatible with the OSE, but nevertheless the link between RT and the OSE seems worth mentioning, partly because it isn't widely recognised/appreciated, and partly because it is particularly tight and clear.<br /><br />On the empirical side, I don't see any reason to limit the hypothesis to semantics. I don't see why it wouldn't also apply to morphosyntax, phonology, and other grains/levels of linguistic analysis. I'd be minded to agree that semantics is the domain for which we have the strongest/best evidence (which you summarise), but there is evidence in these other domains too. The last Evolang conference had *lots* of presentations of this sort.Thomhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05886163808655732964noreply@blogger.com