[CogSci] Modality Matters (EvoLang12 Workshop): Call for Submissions

[Modality Matters]

Announcing "Modality Matters", a workshop of EvoLang12
When: 16th April 2018
Where: Torun, Poland
Abstract Deadline: 22nd December 2017
Full call for papers here: http://hlittle.com/ModalityMatters_cfp.pdf

Modality (the mode in which language is expressed) is a fundamental topic
within language evolution. Most notably, modality is at the centre of the
debate of whether language emerged originally as gesture-first,
speech-first, or multimodal from the start. Further, the affordances
provided to users of existing communication systems are modality-dependent.
Modality can affect how language is grounded, transmitted and used in
interaction and, as a result, feeds into the language evolution debate at
every level. Despite this, much work in evolutionary linguistics,
especially in the domain of models and artificial language experiments,
tends to extrapolate results from only one modality to language generally.
In this workshop, we stress that in order to justify doing this
extrapolation, we need to first fully understand the role of modality in
linguistic emergence.

We invite abstracts that address: a) how modality affects the emergence of
structure and/or iconicity in language or, b) how modality affects the
emergence of mechanisms in interaction (e.g. repair, feedback, turn-timing,
etc.) and linguistic emergence as a result of these mechanisms. Abstracts
might address questions such as: What can we infer from results in
different modalities? What does this mean for generalisability? What might
cross-modal comparisons tell us about universals in communication systems
(pragmatic, structural, etc.)? We encourage contributions that discuss
evolutionary pressures and mechanisms that are modality specific, as well
as work that directly compares data garnered from two or more modalities
collected using models, experiments and/or from real word languages. We
also welcome theoretical and empirical contributions considering the role
of modality in the origins of language.
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