What causes cultural groups to favor specific conventions over others? This study experimentally investigates how environmental factors shape the emergence of linguistic conventions. Adapting the Maze Game task, the study hypothesizes that participants routinize different linguistic strategies to communicate positions in a maze based on environmental affordances (maze structure). Results confirm that subtle environmental motivations drive the emergence of different communicative conventions, suggesting linguistic adaptations are highly sensitive to shared task environments. The study speculates that these local interactional mechanisms, through cultural evolution, contribute to global linguistic variation.

Jonas Nölle, Riccardo Fusaroli, Gregory J. Mills, Kristian Tylén