Language Games
An article in a recent Economist talks about some interesting language research that involves requiring two people to cooperate in a virtual world through a computer interface that prevents them from using known symbols to communicate. They end up inventing their own “language” over the course of the game. The game is not well explained, but it was apparently invented by Bruno Galantucci.
A couple of interesting points:
Having observed winning pairs at play, Dr. Galantucci says that communication is established as soon as one player decides to copy the symbols proposed by his co-player, rather than impose his own. At that point, the pair’s chances of finding each other jump. As soon as there is imitation, he says, there is common currency.
And the best one, in my opinion:
One strength of Dr. Galantucci’s experiment that does not exist in the real world, however, is that he is able to interview his subjects afterwards. What is striking, he says, is that a pair can be successful even if a symbol represents something quite different in the virtual world to each player – as long as they agree on what they should do when confronted by it. In other words, people only need to convey a small amount of information to communicate effectively, and they can do so while holding fundamentally different ideas about how their language describes the world.