Establishing a communication system: Miscommunication drives abstraction

One of the central findings in research on the emergence of communication systems is that interlocutors rapidly converge on a shared set of contracted referring expressions (Krauss and Weinheimer, 1966; Clark, 1996) which become progressively systematized and abstract. This occurs for a wide range of referents, e.g. when referring to spatial locations (Garrod and Doherty, 1994), music (Healey et al, 2002), concepts (Schwartz, 1995), confidence (Fusaroli et al., 2012), and temporal sequences (Mills, 2011). Systematization of referring expressions occurs across modalities – in spoken interaction (Pickering and Garrod, 2004), text-based interaction (Healey and Mills, 2006) and in graphical, mediated interaction (Healey et al., 2007). This pattern is observed both when interlocutors are faced with the task of describing unfamiliar referents (Galantucci, 2005), as well as when interlocutors already possess referring expressions suitable for individuating the referents (Pickering and Garrod, 2004). Even when referring expressions are given experimentally, interlocutors coordinate on the semantics of their referring schemas (Larsson, 2007). Further, the quality of the interaction directly affects the development of coordination. If interlocutors are prevented from providing each other with feedback, e.g. by being prevented from drawing on each other's drawings, this impedes the development of systematicity (Healey, 2007).