@article {5303, title = {The evolution of color naming reflects pressure for efficiency: Evidence from the recent pastAbstract}, journal = {Journal of Language Evolution}, year = {2022}, month = {04/2022}, abstract = {

It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This hypothesis has so far been supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language comparison, rather than directly by diachronic data. Here, we directly test this hypothesis in the domain of color naming, by analyzing recent diachronic data from Nafaanra, a language of Ghana and C{\^o}te d{\textquoteright}Ivoire, and comparing it with quantitative predictions derived from the mathematical theory of efficient data compression. We show that color naming in Nafaanra has changed over the past four decades while remaining near-optimally efficient, and that this outcome would be unlikely under a random drift process that maintains structured color categories without pressure for efficiency. To our knowledge, this finding provides the first direct evidence that color naming evolves under pressure for efficiency, supporting the hypothesis that efficiency shapes the evolution of the lexicon.

}, issn = {2058-4571}, doi = {10.1093/jole/lzac001}, url = {https://academic.oup.com/jole/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jole/lzac001/6566271}, author = {Zaslavsky, Noga and Garvin, Karee and Kemp, Charles and Tishby, Naftali and Regier, Terry} } @proceedings {4928, title = {Competition from novel features drives scalar inferences in reference games}, volume = {43}, year = {2021}, month = {07/2021}, abstract = {

Scalar implicatures, one of the signatures of pragmatic reasoning, are believed to arise from competing alternative utterances, which the listener knows that the speaker could have used to express a strengthened meaning. But do scalar implicatures also arise in the presence of nonce objects, for which no alternative name is known? We conduct a series of experiments assessing the degree of scalar strengthening driven by familiar and nonce objects. We find that nonce objects can derive scalar implicatures as strongly as familiar objects in simple reference games. Our experiments also reveal an asymmetry in the relative strengths of familiar- and nonce-driven inferences: relative to the prior, participants preferentially interpret the name of a shared feature as referring to an object with an additional nonce feature over an object with an additional familiar feature, suggesting that familiar alternatives exert greater scalar pressure than nonce alternatives. We also present exploratory model simulations suggesting that our results may be explained by rationally reasoning about a high-cost description of the novel object. Our findings support the idea that novel lexical entries may be generated from one-shot encounters and spontaneously used in pragmatic inference.

}, url = {https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jx5h8sn}, author = {Hu, Jennifer and Zaslavsky, Noga and Levy, Roger} } @book {4822, title = {Encyclopedia of Color Science and TechnologyBayesian Approaches to Color Category Learning}, year = {2021}, month = {01/2021}, pages = {1 - 5}, publisher = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, organization = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, address = {Berlin, Heidelberg}, isbn = {978-3-642-27851-8}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8}, url = {http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8}, author = {Griffiths, Thomas L. and Zaslavsky, Noga}, editor = {Shamey, Renzo} } @proceedings {4927, title = {Let{\textquoteright}s talk (efficiently) about us: Person systems achieve near-optimal compression}, volume = {43}, year = {2021}, month = {07/2021}, abstract = {

Systems of personal pronouns (e.g.,{\textquoteleft}you{\textquoteright} and {\textquoteleft}I{\textquoteright}) vary widely across languages, but at the same time not all possible systems are attested. Linguistic theories have generally accounted for this in terms of strong grammatical constraints, but recent experimental work challenges this view. Here, we take a novel approach to understanding personal pronoun systems by invoking a recent information-theoretic framework for semantic systems that predicts that languages efficiently compress meanings into forms. We find that a test set of cross-linguistically attested personal pronoun systems achieves near-optimal compression, supporting the hypothesis that efficient compression shapes semantic systems. Further, our best-fitting model includes an egocentric bias that favors a salient speaker representation, accounting for a well-known typological generalization of person systems ({\textquoteleft}Zwicky{\textquoteright}s Generalization{\textquoteright}) without the need for a hard grammatical constraint.

}, url = {https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sj4t8m3}, author = {Zaslavsky, Noga and Maldonado, Mora and Culbertson, Jennifer} }