Pragmatics > Language as shaped by the environment: linguistic construal in a collaborative spatial task

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2020. [All Versions]. [Code & Data]. [Dialogue Experimental Toolkit(DiET)]. The present study sets out to experimentally investigate how environmental factors come to shape the emergence of linguistic conventions. To this end, the authors adapt the classical Maze Game task to test the hypothesis that participants routinise different linguistic strategies to communicate positions in the maze contingent on particular environmental affordances (i.e. structure of the mazes). The results confirm that subtle environmental motivations drive the emergence of different communicative conventions in an otherwise identical task, suggesting that linguistic adaptations are highly sensitive to factors of the shared task environment.