Universal Principles of Human Communication: Preliminary Evidence From a Cross-cultural Communication Game.

Universal Principles of Human Communication: Preliminary Evidence From a Cross-cultural Communication Game. Cogn Sci. 2018 Jul 26;: Authors: Fay N, Walker B, Swoboda N, Umata I, Fukaya T, Katagiri Y, Garrod S Abstract The present study points to several potentially universal principles of human communication. Pairs of participants, sampled from culturally and linguistically distinct societies (Western and Japanese, N = 108: 16 Western-Western, 15 Japanese-Japanese and 23 Western-Japanese dyads), played a dyadic communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of experimenter-specified items to a partner by drawing, but without speaking or using letters or numbers. This paradigm forced participants to create a novel communication system. A range of similar communication behaviors were observed among the within-culture groups (Western-Western and Japanese-Japanese) and the across-culture group (Western-Japanese): They (a) used iconic signs to bootstrap successful communication, (b) addressed breakdowns in communication using other-initiated repairs, (c) simplified their communication behavior over repeated social interactions, and (d) aligned their communication behavior over repeated social interactions. While the across-culture Western-Japanese dyads found the task more challenging, and cultural differences in communication behavior were observed, the same basic findings applied across all groups. Our findings, which r...
Source: Cognitive Science - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cogn Sci Source Type: research