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

Abstract

Abstract 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.