Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Ambiguity has often been viewed as a hindrance to communi-cation. In contrast, Piantadosi et al. (2012) argued that ambi-guity may be useful in that it allows communication to be ef-ficient, and they found support for this argument in the spokenforms of modern English, Dutch, and German. The historicalorigins of this phenomenon cannot be probed in the case of spo-ken language, but they can for written language, as it leaves anenduring trace. Here, we explore ambiguity and efficiency inone of the earliest known written forms of language: Sumeriancuneiform. Sumerian cuneiform exhibits extensive ambiguity,and for that reason it has been considered to be poorly suited forcommunication. We find, however, that ambiguity in Sumeriancuneiform supports efficient communication, mirroring the ear-lier findings for spoken English, Dutch, and German. Thus, theearly stages of human writing exhibit evidence suggesting pres-sure for communicative efficiency.