The role of cognition for unpredictable content in the evolution of writing – UNPREDICTABLE

The appearance of writing was a turning point in the evolution of human communication and cognition; yet writing did not evolve independently in most human societies. For millennia, many societies only used specialised graphic codes representing specific types of information—personal emblems, numbers, calendric units, among others. In the societies that invented writing independently, the notation of speech sounds is preceded by such specialised notations, and is first used for telegraphic writing (encoding only some parts of speech), giving rise to full sentences notation only centuries later. This project attempts to describe this phenomenon systematically, to provide a cognitively plausible explanation for it, and to explore the broader implications of the underlying psychological mechanisms. We hypothesise that contextually unpredictable content is more likely to be encoded: we are more likely to explicitly say or write what cannot be guessed. We will test three hypotheses: (H1) some types of content are consistently more predictable than others, in a way that is to a certain extent robust to historical and cross-linguistic variations; (H2) people can detect unpredictable content and they ascribe cognitive value to it; (H3) the evolution of writing and other graphic codes should follow a sequence, with the invention and use of codes for highly unpredictable content (e.g. numerical quantities) occurring first, followed by the encoding of predictable content (e.g. articles or prepositions). The project is based on three different methodologies: Computational linguistic methods on big text corpora will test H1; H2 will be tested by conducting experiments to test whether participants detect unpredictable content types as such, and whether mentioning unpredictable content enhances the perceived value of explanations and arguments; we will test H3 through a systematic investigation of the evolution of graphic codes dedicated to various types of content.