Cog Lunch: eronica Boyce

March 31, 2026
12pm
Location: 46-3189

Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/98936919505​​​​​​​

Speaker: Veronica Boyce

Affiliation: Levy Lab​​​​​​​

Title: Constraints on the emergence and interpretability of linguistic conventions

Abstract: Human communication takes place across many circumstances, and humans are adept at flexibly using language to achieve goals even in constrained conditions. The formation of linguistic conventions is often studied in iterated reference games, where over repeated reference to the same targets, a describer--matcher pair establishes partner-specific shorthand names for targets. In my dissertation work, we expand the range of empirical evidence about when conventionalization occurs and what types of conventions are formed, all within the framework of iterated reference games. I’ll present three main lines of work. In the first, we ask which properties of the group's interaction structure facilitate successful communication, using a repeated reference game paradigm where we manipulated several key constraints on the group's interaction, including group size, the amount of feedback that matchers could give to directors, and the availability of peer interaction between matchers. In the second, we explore the developing pragmatic and referential communicative abilities of young children using a simplified, child-friendly paradigm.  In the third, we consider the nature of conventions in iterated reference games, in particular to what extent the partner-specificity of these linguistic conventions causes them to be opaque to outsiders (both other humans and vision-language models), and how this depends on the linguistic context.