Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Words exist for referring at many levels of specificity: from the broadest (thing) to the most specific (Fido). What drives the emergence of these taxonomies of reference? Recent com- putational theories of language evolution suggest that commu- nicative demands of the environment may play a deciding role. Here, we investigate local pragmatic mechanisms of lexical adaptation that may undergird global emergence by manipulat- ing context in a repeated reference game where pairs of partic- ipants interactively coordinate on an artificial communication system. We hypothesize that pairs should converge on specific names (e.g. Fido) when the context requires frequently mak- ing fine distinctions between entities; conversely, they should converge on a more compressed system of conventions for ab- stract categories (e.g. dog) in coarser contexts, even if a finer mapping would be sufficient. We show differences in the lev- els of abstraction that emerged in different environments and introduce a statistical approach to probe the dynamics of emer- gence.