Language formation experiments in virtual worlds

Virtual Worlds are computer-mediated environments, in which we can monitor the interactions among our tools, the human users of the tools, and the humans themselves. They thus provide a powerful new experimental platform for studying issues that were heretofore very difficult. In this paper, we describe an experiment to study two claims about language formation: (1) all communication requires shared semantics (and not shared syntax), and (2) shared semantics requires shared experience. The key technical contributor is a new data structure called a Conceptual Category, which allows us to deal with representational and other semiotic issues within the program.

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