Noise, time, and signal reduction in a laboratory communication game

We present an experimental communication game study designed to investigate the effects of noise, context, and time pressures on communication systems. This study is inspired by and follows on from an earlier study, designed to model the emergence of grammatical focus using a simple nonlinguistic communication game paradigm in which participants communicated line figures by selecting cells in a grid to send to each other. In our study, the communication task was more challenging, and a confound between noise and effort pressures was removed. We found that signals became reduced over time, though to a lesser extent given noise, which made communication significantly harder. Time pressures reduced the effect of noise. In general, signals became more stable over time, but noise interfered with the stabilization process. Overall, this study supports the findings of earlier work that employed a much simpler communication task and contributes to our understanding of how information structure gets into language.