The Language Game by Morten H. Christiansen

Author:Morten H. Christiansen [Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Lab-Based Games of Telephone

The shared focal points of one’s community, which are the targets of C-learning, are shaped by cultural evolution to fit our specific biological limitations and cultural expectations. Insights into how focal points can arise come from experimental work that cleverly redeploys the popular game of telephone (“Chinese whispers” in the UK) to re-create language evolution in the lab. In the telephone game, children form a line and the first player comes up with a word or message that they whisper into the ear of the next player, who then whispers what they heard (or think they heard) to the third player, and so on until the end of the line is reached. The last player then says aloud whatever they think they heard, and it is compared to what the first player really said. The word or message typically gets garbled along the way, often to humorous effect—hence the popularity of the game.

Nearly a century ago, the celebrated British psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett, the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge, pioneered the use of the game of telephone to study cultural evolution.7 He was interested in how background knowledge and cultural expectations can alter what we remember, and how this might change our collective memories across time. In one famous line of studies, he asked people to listen to and recall different indigenous folktales, such as the Native American story “The War of the Ghosts.” The first participant in a study would read an adaptation of the original tale and afterward write down what they could recall from memory. The next person would read what the first person had written and then reproduce what they could remember, and so on, in a chain of ten or more people. The story changed substantially across “generations” of participants, becoming much shorter and to the point, transforming from a ghost story with many ethereal elements into a straightforward account of a fight and subsequent death, without any supernatural overtones. Over generations, Bartlett suggested, the tale had been adapted to the cultural expectations of the participants in the study. He also observed similar conventionalization of visual depictions when people were asked to draw pictures from memory. In one such case, the unfamiliar Egyptian hieroglyph “mulak,” which resembles an owl, was transmogrified over generations into a much more familiar-looking cat (see Figure 6.1).

FIGURE 6.1. Drawings from Bartlett’s (1932) visual game-of-telephone study, showing reproductions 1 through 10, ordered left to right and top to bottom. The original drawing of an owl-like Egyptian hieroglyph gradually mutates into a cat.

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