Experimental Semiotics: A Systematic Categorization of Experimental Studies on the Bootstrapping of Communication Systems

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-2182855/v1

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Systematic Review

Experimental Semiotics: A Systematic Categorization of Experimental Studies on the Bootstrapping of Communication Systems

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2182855/v1

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published 15 May, 2023

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Experimental Semiotics (ES) is the study of "novel forms of communication which people develop when they cannot use pre-established communication" (Galantucci 2012). Thus, it tackles pragmatics in a “pure”, radical sense, capturing the process of creating the relation between signs and their interpreters as biological, psychological, and social beings (see e.g. Morris 1938 or the notion of “intermediary pragmatics” in Bar-On 2021). Broadly defined ES has arguably become the most prolific experimental approach in language evolution research.

In our paper we report the results of a study on the scope of recent ES research concerned with the emergence of novel communication systems and evaluate the ways in which it is relevant to the study of pragmatics from an evolutionary perspective. We have coded for multiple levels across 13 dimensions related to the properties of the emergent communication systems or properties of the study designs – such as coordination versus referential tasks, modality of communication, the absence or presence of turn-taking, sample size or director/matcher role distribution.

We discuss our findings and our classification, focusing on the advantages and limitations of those tendencies in ES, and in particular their ecological validity in the context of bootstrapping communication and the evolution of language.

linguistics

experimental semiotics

lanugage origins

communication systems

semiotic game

language evolution

Experimental Semiotics (ES) “focuses on the experimental investigation of novel forms of human communication […] which people develop when they cannot use pre-established communication systems” (Galantucci & Garrod 2011, p. 1). A typical semiotic experiment has the form of a game in which participants attempt to communicate without using conventional signs. As a familiar example, think of the popular party game of charades, where the actor (in ES often technically referred to as the director) must convey without using language a movie title to an audience of guessers (matchers), using to that end non-linguistic resources such as gestures, facial expressions and other bodily movements. Of course, the repertoire of ES games is much broader, involving, for example, the use of drawings, abstract shapes and symbols, and non-linguistic vocalizations.

A key advantage of ES is that it equips researchers with tools to investigate communication in very general terms, distinguishing the mechanisms of different communication systems (Galantucci et al., 2012). This makes ES relevant for a range of fields in cognitive science and the study of communication, and makes its results particularly valuable for several subfields of linguistic research. For example, this approach shows that different factors that operate during communication (such as the structure of meanings or biases for alignment between interlocutors) and during transmission (including population dynamics and constraints on learning) contribute to structures that emerge under different circumstances, and shape the patterns of variation in most languages (Tamariz, 2017).

ES is a successor of an earlier tradition of laboratory studies on language acquisition and change. In a recent review, Nölle and Galantucci (2021) list several 20^th century laboratory experiments on communication whose paradigms resemble the ones used by ES, albeit they have a different focus^{^[1]}. The other close intellectual cousin of ES is Experimental Pragmatics (see esp. Galantucci and Garrod 2011). Experimental Pragmatics investigates how humans use pre-established forms of communication, such as spoken language in dialogic form, with a specific focus on pragmatic aspects of communication like relevance, degree of specificity, and structure. However, the main difference is that ES focuses on the emergence of novel forms of communication and so it prevents participants from using natural language, while Experimental Pragmatics studies already existing forms of communication in various contextual situations.

Particularly interesting is the role that Experimental Semiotics has come to play in the studies on the evolutionary origins and development of language. At its core, ES investigates the process of creating the relation between signs and their interpreters as biological, psychological, and social beings (see e.g. Morris 1938 or the notion of “intermediary pragmatics” in Bar-On 2021). The relationship between symbols and referents, which makes symbolic thought distinct from mere associations-making processes, was seen as the hallmark of human reasoning and language, and essential for their phylogenetic development. It has been of interest since ancient times, with a key question being if it was an innate and universal ability or the outcome of complex social processes. A number of unverified stories speak to this interest in recreating the process of how a communication system is born: namely through children being raised in linguistic isolation without any human interaction (see e.g. Żywiczyński 2018). Such a cruel procedure, known as the “forbidden experiment”, was allegedly performed by Psamtik I of Egypt, Frederick II (Hohenstaufen) of Sicily and James IV of Scotland (Campbell and Grieve, 1981). The only conclusion to be drawn is that language is not entirely innate: if a child is completely deprived of any linguistic input, (s)he will not speak any language (Galantucci, 2017). ES could now be seen as an up-to-modern-day-ethical-standards descendant of these stories about cruel experiments of the past. Its goals consist in studying how communication systems are brought into existence and how sets of conventional relations are created and then shaped through repeated use; this in turn helps understand the processes which underlie the development of language, both in ontogeny and phylogeny (Galantucci, 2005).

Over the years, ES has grown to be an extensive field and, as such, it became the object of a number of overviews (e.g. by Galantucci et al. 2012; Galantucci and Roberts 2012; Galantucci 2017). In one early summary of ES research, Galantucci and colleagues (2012) outlined the basic research problems tackled in the field, described the main study paradigms, and explained their implications for linguistics. They described three types of experimental paradigms: semiotic referential games, semiotic coordination games, and semiotic matching games. The authors also recognised five main research themes of ES: “the emergence of linguistic structure, the role of interaction in communication, the role of inter- and intragenerational processes in the evolution of language, the study of sociolinguistic processes in the laboratory, and the bootstrapping of communication” (Galantucci et al. 2012: 581). To demonstrate ES’s potential as a major complement for linguistic research, Galantucci et al. (2012) specified three reasons: enabling the study of novel communication systems; providing full access to the history of their development; and the potential for easily controlling the conditions of this development. Another, similar overview of ES recognises three main themes: linguistic properties as the consequence of communication, social factors in communication, and the bootstrapping of communication (Galantucci and Roberts 2012). The authors also list three areas of ES that could provide new discoveries for the understanding of human communication: egocentric failures, identification strategies, and novel manipulations.

Importantly from the perspective of this paper, all the existing overviews of ES follow the traditional format of the review paper, without applying the tools of a systematic literature review (SLR). Although these existing overviews describe the particular paradigms in considerable detail, their narrative and coverage of the literature are necessarily subjective and selective. In this paper, we propose a different, bottom-up, approach to characterizing ES, inspired by the systematic literature review approach (SLR, Xiao and Watson 2019). Our main goal is to create a comprehensive resource of ES studies relevant to the earliest stages of establishing a communication system, categorised by a broad range of design parameters. In doing so we aim to create a resource that will be of help for future ES works, but also to understand how to direct research and which paradigms have been ignored. To this end, we conducted a systematic review of 60 studies in ES, published between 2002 and 2021. We have coded the papers for multiple levels across dimensions related to the properties of the emergent communication system and the properties of the study design. The results of the coding were subject to a statistical data analysis as categorical variables. Other dimensions were textual and reflected more general and qualitative aspects of the papers, e.g. their main findings. All the coding was compiled into a single, interoperable and reusable dataset, which is described in detail below. Thanks to these efforts, we are able to provide here a novel, systematic approach to characterizing the properties of ES studies.

^{^[1]} These include the experiments done by Bartlett (1932) and Bavelas (1950, 1952), who studied how information transmission leads to the creation of ‘stereotypical’ memory patterns or the emergence of leadership roles, and the early attempts of using artificial miniature languages to study language change (e.g., Esper, 1925; Wolfle, 1933).

2.1. Inclusion Criteria, Acquisition of Articles, Coding Procedure

2.1.1. Inclusion Criteria

Although a classic understanding of ES restricts its meaning to “controlled studies in which human adults develop novel communication systems” (Galantucci et al. 2012: 477), this definition is occasionally extended onto controlled studies in which adults “impose novel structure on systems provided to them” (Galantucci et al. 2012: 477). On this broader definition, ES also subsumes studies where sign-meaning pairings are already provided by the experimenters rather than emerging naturally in the game, as in most “alien language” studies using the iterated learning paradigm (e.g. Cuskley 2019). In line with our interest in language origins, and in particular the early bootstrapping phase of communication, we adopted this first – classic and narrower – definition of ES as an inclusion criterion. That is, we included studies on the emergence of novel communication systems, and excluded studies in which participants begin from learning the meanings already assigned by fiat to a set of signs. For practical reasons, we limited articles to those that had been published in peer-reviewed journals, thus excluding e.g. experiments reported in chapters in edited volumes or proceedings papers.

2.1.2. Acquisition of Articles

We identified and acquired the articles matching the inclusion criteria through a three-step procedure. In the first step, an initial list of ES studies consistent with our criteria was compiled bottom-up. In the second step, the coders went through the references of the articles in the initial list, as well as references in review articles (Galantucci et al. 2012; Galantucci and Roberts 2012; Galantucci 2017, Galantucci and Garrod 2011; Nölle and Galantucci 2021) to identify articles containing further studies eligible for inclusion. Finally, the coders did a series of targeted searches on Google Scholar for keywords such as “experimental semiotics”, “semiotic game”, or “laboratory languages”, and on Connected Papers, in order to extend the search to all the studies linked by similar topics. The completeness of the list created in steps one through three was later checked with a leading expert in ES.

2.1.3. Coding Procedure

The coders were first trained on applying the coding dimensions to an initial set of 2 papers each. Their coding was then discussed and refined by all researchers. All the papers on the final list were then distributed among 8 coders (the main researchers). First, they worked independently, each coding the assigned papers for the 13 dimensions described below (Section 2.2.). Then, they discussed all codings in a group, settling ambiguous cases in the course of discussion. There was no unsettled disagreement between the coders.

2.2. Coding Dimensions

The papers were coded for three types of dimensions: (1) basic bibliographic and scientometric information (the year of publication, the total number of citations on Google Scholar as of 22nd April 2022, as well as citations per year), which gave us an idea of the popularity of each paper in the field; (2) general information: the paper’s main themes or topics, a brief summary of the main findings, the number of participants, their age range, and the experimental setting (laboratory or online); (3) study design properties, which were treated as categorical variables, coded as numerical values assigned to category labels. For example, the variable “type of game” had two values, “1” for referential games and “2” for coordination games. These values were then analysed statistically. The dimensions included in (3) are described in detail below. The coding dimensions are based on the descriptions of ES paradigms and the key differences evident in different studies, which can be related to overarching type differences.

2.2.1. Type of Games: Referential vs Coordination

Despite its recent origin, ES has already developed two main paradigms: referential games and coordination games. The referential framework of ES derives from standard referential communication tasks that were employed in Experimental Pragmatics (see e.g., Krauss & Weinheimer, 1966), in which participants had to converse about novel shapes using natural language. In the ES version, the use of natural language is forbidden, so players have to communicate about a predetermined stimulus (e.g. a piece of music or a concept) using other means. In standard referential games, the set of signals used for communication is open; while the set of referents to communicate about is closed and pre-established by the experimenters (Galantucci et al., 2012) (see the section 2.2.3.). The purpose of the communicative act is communication itself: the goal of the director is to have the matcher correctly guess the intended meaning. A paradigmatic model of referential games is the “Pictionary” set-up employed by Garrod et al. (2007), in which the director has to graphically depict various concepts so as to communicate them to the matcher(s).

In coordination games, the communicative act is instrumental for the purpose of the game, which is succeeding in a specific task, which usually involves moving an agent in a virtual space and coordinating the moves with the partner. In these games, successful communication can be supported by different sets of referents, so players have to agree not only on the set of signals but also on the set of referents used to make communication successful (Galantucci et al., 2012). One model of coordination games has been dubbed the “tacit communication game” (TCG; Galantucci 2017): in TCG, each player of a dyad controls one virtual agent (a geometric figure, the “token”, which can be moved and rotated) over a 3 x 3 grid, and their goal is to place their tokens in the correct positions, established by the experimenters. Only one of the players, the sender, knows the correct position and has to communicate it to the other using only moves over the board. The moves of the sender thus serve a double function of, firstly, moving the player token into the correct position and, secondly, of communicating to the other player their correct position. The sender has to find a way to make it clear which moves have just an instrumental purpose and which have a communicative one.

2.2.2. Vertical Transmission

In most ES studies, a communication task is performed within a dyad or larger group of participants whose composition remains constant throughout the ES game. However, there is an interesting minority of studies with a dynamic group composition, so that some players leave and others join the group within the timeframe of the game. Such a design enables the vertical transmission of information, which happens when the communicative output of one generation (e.g. a set of signs they have converged on) becomes the input that a next generation is exposed to. One example of this are replacement microsociety studies (e.g., Caldwell & Smith, 2012), in which the interacting group is composed of a director and a small number of receivers, and at the end of each turn the director is removed from the game and the most experienced matcher becomes the new director; while a new player enters the group as the least experienced matcher. These studies simulate a natural aspect of human society: the communicative conventions created at a given time are passed to the next generations, which have to learn and inevitably modify them. To insert this vertical transmission of established conventions into ES designs thus offers a way to study the cultural evolution of sign systems. However, studies that do not feature vertical transmission instead focus on the emergence of novel communication systems in the interaction of agents engaged in a particular activity, either reference or coordination (e.g., Galantucci et al., 2012).

2.2.3. Signals and Referents

Two dimensions in our coding scheme concern the type of the signals adopted in each experiment. The first one is about the kind of medium employed in communication. A large majority of experiments use either vocalizations, bodily-visual signals (i.e. communicative bodily movement, such as gesture, pantomime, facial expression or gaze), or graphical signals (drawing, symbols, lines, colours and so on). There was also a small minority of studies whose medium of communication did not fall in any of these three possibilities (e.g., Iizuka et al., 2013).

The category signal space was further subdivided into discrete and continuous. In a discrete signal space, senders chose the signal from a set of specific, predefined possibilities, often limited in number, effectively making signal production a multiple alternative forced choice task. An example of a discrete signal space would be choosing an Arabic numeral from a set of 1 through 10 as the signal to be sent to the receiver. TCGs are games which usually employ a discrete signal space: the possible configurations of the tokens which the sender has to use for communicative purposes are inherently limited because the token can only move on a small grid (for example, Blokpoel et al., 2012). Conversely, in a continuous signal space senders could produce any signal form possible within the constraints of the communication medium; an example would be pen-and-paper (or digital) drawings, which are not limited to a number of distinct variants but instead can take on any shape. An interesting but much less frequent possibility is that the signal space is continuous but not unlimited: in this case, the director has to choose inside a spectrum of possibilities, for example shades of colour (an example is Roberts & Clark, 2020).

We also coded for what we dubbed the meaning space, identifying the types of referents used for communication. The referents can be common concepts (objects or actions which are easily verbalizable, like “house”, “dog” or “giving a kiss”) or more abstract entities (unfamiliar geometric shapes, pieces of music, configurations). We have decided to create another level for this category, which mostly applies to coordination games, that is when the referents are a particular position or disposition of the tokens. In Zlatev et al. (2017), we have an example of a study with a referential game, in which referents made up of meaningful concepts are taken as meaning space. In this case, pantomime was used in order to express concepts such as a father kissing his daughter, a person hugging another person, and so on. In Stevens and Roberts (2019), on the other hand, we have a coordination game, as the sender and the receiver had to coordinate in order to find the best way to communicate and interpret the expressed signs. The meaning space was made up of lines inside the cells: therefore, it was the position of the signs that was communicated. In this sense we claim that the meaning space referred to a location.

2.2.4. Interaction

We also wanted to look into the parameters of interactions between the players and the general setup of the game. One of the categories we used for this is related to the feedback, that is information about the outcome of the communicative interaction process. As a simple example, if the director produces a clenched-fist gesture, to which the matcher responds “war”, in most studies this will be followed by feedback in the form of “correct” (if “war” was indeed the intended meaning) or “wrong” (if the intended meaning was something else). We were interested in the source of this information: in some experiments feedback comes from the other player(s), in others from the experimenter themselves and in others still there is no feedback. Sometimes (as in the Pictionary-like game in Fay et al., 2017) feedback is one of the studied variables as its presence or absence can alter communicative success and other important properties of the exchange.

Related to feedback is the category of turn-taking, describing the turn-order of the players’ actions. As one option, there could be no turn structure, with players free to take their actions at any time and in any order, even simultaneously. But there could also be a fixed turn structure governing the exchange of turns; a frequent pattern is the director acting first by sending the signal and then the matcher selecting a possible referent. Such a structure could either be pre-specified, i.e. imposed by the mechanics of the experiment, or may emerge spontaneously in the course of the game, despite not being formally determined by the experimenters. A different category, interchangeability, captured whether the roles of directors and matchers were assigned to particular players for the entire duration of the game, or if players could change their roles. That is, if a player could be the director at one point of the game and then change their role to that of the matcher at another point, interchangeability was present. Conversely, if one player was always the director and the other – always the matcher, interchangeability was absent.

Two further categories related to the interacting group. Group size was the total number of players in a group, whereas communication type referred to how many players took part in an individual interaction act. For example, if a study had groups consisting of seven players but each communicative act always happened between two players, group size and communication type would be classified respectively as “larger groups” and “dyadic communication”.

Finally, we looked at if the interaction between senders and receivers in the experimental setup was simultaneous or not. A simultaneous interaction is when the reception of the signal happens immediately after its creation by the director, which is characteristic of live interaction. If instead the matcher is looking at a stimulus recorded at an earlier time, the interaction is considered to be non-simultaneous.

2.2.5. Alignment of Interest

The category of alignment of interest was introduced to study one of our greatest conceptual interests: if language origin was marked by a competitive or cooperative use of our communicative means. Language is traditionally believed to be born out of a cooperative attitude among humans: after all, if signals were used mostly for deceptive purposes, no one would have reason to trust them and language would become useless and disappear. Note that models of animal communication, inspired by Krebs and Dawkins (1984; also Dawkins and Krebs 1978), mostly see communication as a means to influence and manipulate the behavior of others to one’s own advantage: the cooperative presupposition would in fact imply an evolutionarily unlikely altruism by the senders of signals or a similarly unlikely gullibility by receivers. Some current models of language’s functioning and evolution consider it to be characterized by a mixture of competitiveness and cooperativeness (Sperber et al., 2010; Lee and Pinker, 2010). ES is a particularly well-suited means for the study of the emergence of early properties of human communication, such as compositionality and combinatoriality, under the influence of humans’ pragmatic abilities. It would be interesting to know if this development can also happen when there are differing interests between the people involved in communication. An important distinction must be made here: one thing is competition among interacting groups (which is sometimes employed as an incentive for players: the group with higher communication success receives more points – sometimes associated with some monetary prize); another is competition inside each interacting group, that is the existence of a conflict of interest between senders and receivers. This latter kind of competition is the one we are interested about as it allows us to study the competitive or cooperative nature of early communication.

2.2.6. Summary

This is a short summary of the dimensions which entered the statistical analysis. The numbers associated with each value (which are followed by the explanation of those values) are the actual numbers that were subject to a cluster analysis. In all cases a further value “other” was added for those papers which did not fit into any of the pre-established levels. In those cases, some further specification was added.

Dimension	Description	Values
Game type	if the goal of the game is to be understood (referential) or if communication is a means to achieve something else (coordination).	1. Referential 2. Coordination
Vertical Transmission	if the study incorporates replacing “generations” of players.	1. Vertical transmission is present 2. There is no vertical transmission
Medium of communication	the medium of the signals.	1. Vocalizations 2. Bodily-visual 3. Graphical
Signal Space	properties of the set of usable signals as means of communication.	1. Limited and Discrete 2. Open and Continuous 3. Continuous but limited
Meaning Space	the type of meaning of the referents.	1. Meaningful concepts / words 2. Abstract shapes / symbols / configurations 3. Location
Feedback	the source from which participants receive information about the outcome of the game.	1. No feedback 2. Feedback comes from other participants 3. Feedback comes from the experimenters or emerges from the experimental setup itself 4. Feedback is provided by both the system and the participants 5. Other
Turn-taking	does the study include roles of directors and matchers or not?	1. The roles are pre-established by the experimenters 2. The roles are absent in the study 3. The roles are not formally established by the experimenters but they emerge spontaneously
Interchangeability	do the players exchange their roles as matchers and receivers?	1. Yes, players alternate between the roles 2. No, players remain in their role for all the length of the experiment
Group size	number of people in each interacting group	1. Pairs 2. Small groups (three to five people) 3. Large groups (more than five people)
Communication type	number of people involved in each interaction	1. Dyadic 2. Triadic 3. Four-way
Simultaneity	is the interaction simultaneous or is the matcher watching a recording?	1. Simultaneous 2. Non simultaneous
Alignment of interest	is there a conflict of interest inside the interacting group’s members?	1. Common interests 2. Conflict of interests

To follow up on our first example, according to these coding dimensions, a typical game of charades would be classified as referential (goal: to be understood, to convey a concept), involving no vertical transmission (or only marginally so, if successive players adopted some gestures and pantomimes used by the previous players), a bodily-visual medium of communication, an open and continuous signal space (no predefined set of gestures – any bodily configuration can be used), a meaning space of meaningful concepts (such as movie titles), feedback that comes from the director, no turn taking (directors and matchers do not need to wait their turn, can send signals / provide responses at any time and in any order), the presence of interchangeability, (people change roles of doing the pantomimes and guessing their meaning), group size and communication type that depend on the number of matchers in the audience; interaction that is simultaneous (unless the pantomimes are recorded and later shown to the matchers), and the interests that are aligned (the director wants the matchers to guess correctly, and so do the matchers).

To demonstrate how our database can be used, below we present an exploratory study of changes in the coding dimensions and properties of ES studies over the years.

3.1. Analysis Example: ES Over the Years

To properly understand the evolution of ES studies, we have conducted a cluster analysis based on 11 features described in section 2: “Vertical transmission?”, “Referential vs. Coordination”, “Medium of communication”, “Signal space”, “Meaning space”, “Feedback”, “Communication type”, “Group size”, “Participants of the main study: Age”, “Turn-taking”, “Interchangeability of the signaller / receiver roles”. Using the Python programming language (van Rossum & Drake, 1995) and the scikit-learn library (Pedregosa et al., 2011), we ran a k-means clustering algorithm that classified papers into six clusters based on these features; the optimal number of clusters was determined by using the elbow method. Fig. 1^{^[2]} shows how the clusters are distributed over the considered decades, with each color corresponding to a specific cluster.

One thing that stood out when looking at the coded dimensions is the presence of static categories, i.e. those dimensions that varied little or very little in most of the studies analyzed throughout the entire period of time considered. Among the static dimensions, we have "Communication type," which was almost exclusively dyadic (although in recent years, there has been a greater presence of non-dyadic communication); "Vertical transmission?," which reports only four studies containing some transmission of the result of the communication task from one group to another; "Lab or online," with only two studies that were conducted online; "Simultaneous interaction," of which only six studies were not characterized by a contextual interaction; and "Alignment of interests," with only two studies that included any conflict of interest.

Regarding the dynamic categories, on the other hand, an example is given in the "Feedback" dimension, which for the 2002-2007 period was characterized by a predominance of information received from the experimenter, or more generally from the system. Only one of these studies showed a different value. In Fig. 2, it is possible to observe this phenomenon, with a progressive decrease of the paradigm over the considered decades.

Another salient dimension is "Medium of communication," characterized – in the period between 2009 and 2014 – by the fact that it was made up almost exclusively of studies that used a graphical medium (except for one). In Fig. 3, it is possible to note that there has been a decrease in the number of studies that used a graphical type of communication over the decades.

Two closely related dimensions are "Referential vs. coordination" and "Meaning space." In fact, starting from 2014, it is possible to observe an almost exclusive use of referential games, which corresponds to an equally preponderant use of meaningful words / concepts of the relative "Meaning space" dimension (Fig. 4 and Fig. 5).

Here in both categories it is possible to observe a progressively predominant use of the aforementioned values. This is consistent with the obvious remark that when the goal of the game is to be understood, as in referential tasks, it is easier for the relative meaning to be made up of meaningful concepts (or, at most, abstract shapes), while when one is faced with coordination games, in which communication is only a means, it is easier to have location as a meaning space.

Another interesting dimension is "Signal space", which, starting from 2014 becomes almost exclusively open and continuous (in only one paper this is not the case), with a trend that over the decades sees a progressively predominant presence of the related value (Fig. 6).

3.2. Discussion

One of the research questions we mentioned was whether there is any particular reason for the presence of static categories, that is, why most ES studies show largely identical values for specific dimensions. While the reasons for the lack of diversity in research designs under certain dimensions can be investigated in more detail in future studies, below we offer some preliminary answers. It seems intuitive that dyadic communication is more suitable for the observation of communicative interaction according to the classic model of sender/receiver, despite the recent increase in the interest in non-dyadic studies. The relative absence of vertical transmission may be in a large part due to our inclusion criteria limited to studies on the creation of new communicative systems “from scratch”, while vertical transmission is typically studied in the lab with artificial language designs, where the initial signal-meaning pairings are given to the participants (e.g. Kirby et al. 2008 for a classic example). The paucity of studies carried out online could also be due to the fact that the laboratory is perhaps more suitable for building experimental settings that are as ecologically realistic as possible. A similar argument could be valid for studies that do not involve some kind of a simultaneous interaction.

It would be interesting to explore why recently there has been a drop in the number of studies that make use of the coordination task paradigm; one answer could be that it is more logistically challenging. However, the studies that use coordination games are potentially of considerable interest for ES and more generally for the analysis of the bootstrapping of communication systems, as some kind of alignment of interests is necessary in order to achieve coordination, and this could potentially highlight some of the social and cognitive dynamics that underlie communication and more generally language. One factor for coordination tasks being used less frequently is surely that it is more difficult to establish novel form-meaning pairings for purposes of coordination than for purposes of simple reference. This is the case because for referential communication games the potential meaning space is generally more limited and prespecified, as opposed to the meaning space required for coordination games which is potentially open-ended.

A separate discussion has to be made about the "Alignment of interests" dimension. Again, there are only two studies in which the competition or conflict of interest paradigm is involved. This seems to be consistent with what the theory says: that it is difficult to imagine the bootstrapping of a communication system without some kind of cooperation. Of the two studies considered, at least in one case, there was some positive effect of competition in the consolidation of communication. However, this happened when the competition was on a global scale, and not on a local one: the result is that "humans change their level of cooperation as a function of the scale of competition (...), highlighting the importance of considering the scale of competition in studies of cooperation and communication" (dos Santos et al., 2012). Thus, a question could be posed on whether we need more studies with some kind of conflict of interest in order to investigate a possible role of competition in communication, which would be in line with some recent theoretical proposals on the role that persuasion may have played in the evolution of language (Ferretti & Adornetti, 2021).

Starting from 2014, the signal space dimension becomes almost exclusively open and continuous (Fig. 6.), which could be explained by the fact that ES studies seem to become more and more ecologically realistic over time. The use of open and continuous signals is consistent with important threads in the literature on the evolution of language, e.g. related to iconicity and holistic nature of early signs (Perlman et al., 2015). In a study by Nolle et al. (2018) gestural communication is used in order to express meanings represented by drawn characters whose categories are made salient by shared colours. This is an example of an open and continuous signal space, which is also the case in Zlatev et al. (2017).

Some of the research questions we asked relate to the problem of how ES studies have evolved over time: if there are particular trends in specific periods over the examined decades (although experimental semiotics is a rather new research field); if the categories can be related to each other in some way; if there is an explanation we can provide for the observed trends; or why some paradigms are systematically ignored at the expense of others (for example, why there are so few studies with vertical transmission). Other questions could refer to the results of the studies analysed, for example whether similar results correspond to similar experimental paradigms or if there is evidence for specific empirical results that correspond to a coherent global picture, whether they are in line with the theoretical proposals, and so on.

^{^[2]} All visualisations were produced using R programming language (R Core Team, 2020) and the ggplot library (Wickham, 2016)

In this paper, we have presented a novel, systematic approach to the characterisation of ES studies according to the coding dimensions of type of communication game, the presence of vertical transmission, the properties of the signaling and meaning spaces, the type of interaction, and the presence of the alignment of interest. This resulted in a dataset of 60 studies coded for these dimensions. In an exploratory analysis, we then showed how this dataset can be used to look at changes in ES through a cluster analysis of the distribution of coding dimensions over time. This approach, along with the generated, annotated dataset, has a range of potential applications. For example, it allows for a more fine-grained analysis of the similarities and differences in the development of novel communication systems depending on the design features of ES studies. It also allows us to measure which dimensions cluster to provide more information which experimental design is best suited to investigate particular research questions. Overall, an approach that systematically compares the underlying design properties of ES studies can help in specifying the different mechanisms that influence the properties of novel, emerging communication systems.

Funding declaration

This research was supported by the Polish National Science Centre under grant agreement UMO-2019/34/E/HS2/00248

Conflict of interest

The authors have no competing interests as defined by Springer, or other interests that might be perceived to influence the results and/or discussion reported in this paper

Author Contributions Statement

A.D. contributed to the coding, contributed to write the main manuscript and did the cluster analysis.

R.R. contributed to the coding, and contributed to write the main manuscript.

G.S. contributed to the coding, and contributed to write the main manuscript.

A.G. contributed to the coding, contributed to write the main manuscript and did the cluster analysis.

M. Pleyer contributed to the coding, and contributed to write the main manuscript.

M.S. contributed to the coding, and contributed to write the main manuscript.

M. Placiński contributed to the coding, contributed to write the main manuscript, did the cluster analysis, and prepared the figures.

P.Z. contributed to the coding, and contributed to write the main manuscript.

S.W. contributed to the coding, and contributed to write the main manuscript.

All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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No competing interests reported.

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Experimental Semiotics: A Systematic Categorization of Experimental Studies on the Bootstrapping of Communication Systems

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Journal Publication

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Abstract

Figures

1. Introduction

2. Dataset

2.1. Inclusion Criteria, Acquisition of Articles, Coding Procedure

2.1.1. Inclusion Criteria

2.1.2. Acquisition of Articles

2.1.3. Coding Procedure

2.2. Coding Dimensions

2.2.1. Type of Games: Referential vs Coordination

2.2.2. Vertical Transmission

2.2.3. Signals and Referents

2.2.4. Interaction

2.2.5. Alignment of Interest

2.2.6. Summary

3. Application

4. Conclusion

Declarations

References

Additional Declarations

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Journal Publication

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