Sam Tilsen will present an in-person colloquium.
Title: Longitudinal studies of speech pattern dynamics in networks of speakers playing games
Abstract: This talk describes a pair of longitudinal studies that I have conducted to investigate how speech patterns change over time in small networks of speakers playing dyadic map navigation games. The social network study (Socnet) was a 10-week in-person study in which an ad-hoc network of 8 participants played a total of 134 rounds of a game based on the asymmetric giver-receiver map task. Social information regarding teammate preferences was collected from all players after each round, allowing for the quantification of time-varying social distances. Analyses showed strong correlations between social distances and linguistic behavioral distances, indicating that the effects of communicative interactions on behavior were modulated by social factors. The Polylect study is an ongoing online experiment in which cohorts of anonymous participants play many rounds of a symmetric map exploration game. I will present preliminary analyses regarding the hypothesis that dialects—defined as correlations of linguistic features over the network of players—emerge as a consequence of communicative interactions.
