Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Vowel systems exhibit organization, and several theoretical ac-counts have been proposed to explain this. A prominent ac-count explains organization in terms of maximizing the disper-sion of vowels, increasing acoustic perceptibility while reduc-ing articulatory effort. This implies modality-independence,but leaves open questions about the extent to which dispersionis driven by articulatory or acoustic pressures. We investigatedwhether vowel-like organization would emerge in a novel vi-sual communication system in the laboratory, in which partic-ipants took turns to send color signals to communicate a set ofanimal referents by moving their fingers around a color space.We manipulated the extent to which sender and receiver needswere aligned. Overall, systems exhibited significant levels ofdispersion; participants also took into account receiver needs,withconsequences for the structure of the resulting systems.