The Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reveals that cognitive choice shapes the evolutionary direction of language.
China.com Psychology China, February 4 According to the words, like biological species, words in language determine each other's survival in competition. There may be two mechanisms for the trade-off of words in the process of language evolution, namely "neologism" and "cognitive selection". "The emergence of new words" originates from the external environment, and is the need to express new meanings generated by the changing social environment. Changes in the environment (including wars, migrations, social reforms, technological advances, etc.) are relatively random and cannot exert a stable and lasting impact on the evolution of language. In contrast, "cognitive selection" (some innate intrinsic preferences of humans in the process of processing and producing language) is relatively stable and can affect the evolutionary trajectory of language in a fixed direction on a longer time scale.
There are many similarities between linguistic evolution and biological evolution. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Man, the survival of vocabulary in competition is natural selection. If the words in a language are seen as living organisms, they compete with each other for the limited cognitive resources of human beings (such as attention and memory). In the same way that natural selection selects biological features that adapt to the environment through competitive mechanisms, cognitive selection shapes language to become more and more suitable for acquisition, processing, and use by the human brain.
According to the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, under the above evolutionary framework, Li Ying, an associate researcher in the Luan Shenghua research group of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with the help of large-scale psychological experiments and historical text analysis of the above two complementary paradigms, revealed how the impact of cognitive choice on individual language use at the micro level is cumulatively amplified to the phenomenon of language evolution at the macro level. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
This study validates the role of cognitive choice in lexical competition. Previous studies have shown that words with high imagery, earlier acquisition age, and higher emotional intensity have certain advantages in the process of memorization, learning, and processing. Studies in developmental psychology have shown that although cognitive decline impairs the ability of older adults to remember and process all words overall, the impact on figurative vocabulary is relatively small. Therefore, the study hypothesizes that cognitive selection will favor words that are highly visual, acquired earlier, or contain strong emotions, so that words with these characteristics are more likely to be retained in the process of information iteration.
This study uses the classical microphone experimental paradigm to verify the above hypothesis in the context of interpersonal communication. In this paradigm, the participant reads a piece of textual material and then relays it on memory to the next participant. A total of 97 textual messages were prepared, and each message was paraphrased three times. Logistic regression models show that words that are more vivid, older or more emotionally charged are more likely to be retained in paraphrasing. Studies have shown that the same mechanism can explain the phenomenon of language evolution at the macro scale. If this conjecture is correct, then the mechanism found in the study could also explain the fluctuation of word frequency over a 200-year period. Furthermore, the above conjecture is verified. The study analysed two large historical texts and found that the frequency of use of words that were highly visual, learned earlier, or had strong emotions increased more over the past 200 years. This suggests that words with these characteristics are less likely to die out in the process of evolution.
In summary, this study proposes a commonality between language use at the micro level and language evolution at the macro level: under the effect of cognitive selection, humans are the users of language and the shapers of future languages.
Studies have found that in today's information, cognitive choices may play a stronger role in shaping language evolution. The world today has more information than at any time in history, just as too many sheep on the grassland can lead to less food for each sheep, and the explosion of information can lead to a relative lack of cognitive resources. In this case, both the flock and the entire language system experience harsher natural cognitive selection.
However, does this mean that language inevitably "degenerates" in a simpler, more figurative, and more emotional direction? The study disagrees with this. This is due to the fact that cognitive choice is only one of the factors that shape the evolution of language, the other is the need to express fresh meanings that constantly emerge from the external environment. Just as random mutations in the framework of evolution add diversity to the gene pool, the emergence of new words injects new blood into the language system, thereby increasing the complexity of the language. In contrast, cognitive selection restricts the evolution of language in an overly complex direction. Therefore, scientists are studying the law of the birth of new words, and how to make the language system have both expressiveness and conciseness by studying the two opposing mechanisms of neologisms and cognitive selection.
The research work is supported by the National Natural Science Project and the Institute of Psychology.
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