Call for papers for a special issue of Interaction Studies on: `Experimental approaches to the emergence and the evolution of human communication'

In the last few years researchers of human communication have begun to investigate experimentally the emergence and the evolution of novel human communication systems. Interaction Studies is now calling papers for a first special issue dedicated to this newly developing line of research. The main aims of this special issue are to provide an overview of the state of the art in the field and to identify key research directions for the future. We particularly encourage the submission of papers that report experimental research performed with human dyads or larger social units and focus on one of the following key research issues:

• Emergence and/or evolution of shared intentions
• Emergence and/or evolution of shared behavioral routines
• Emergence and/or evolution of communicative forms
• Emergence and/or evolution of shared conceptualizations
• Emergence and/or evolution of linguistic structure

Guest Editors: Bruno Galantucci & Simon Garrod 

Submission instructions and deadlines

Manuscripts should be emailed to Bruno Galantucci (galantuc@...) by February 1, 2009. The manuscript should be no longer than 8000 words and follow the journal's guidelines. Reviews will be completed by April 1, 2009, and final drafts will be accepted no later than July 1, 2009. The special issue will be published in January 2010.

Related and sample papers

De Ruiter, J. P., Noordzij, M., Newman-Norlund, S., Hagoort, P., & Toni, I. (2007). On the origin of intentions. In P. Haggard, Y. Rossetti & M. Kawato (Eds.), Attention and Performance XXII: Sensorimotor foundation of higher cognition (pp. 593-610). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Galantucci, B. (2005). An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems. Cognitive Science, 29(5), 737-767.

Garrod, S., Fay, N., Lee, J., Oberlander, J., & MacLeod, T. (2007). Foundations of Representation: Where Might Graphical Symbol Systems Come From? Cognitive Science, 31(6), 961-987.

Healey, P. G. T., Swoboda, N., Umata, I., & King, J. (2007). Graphical language games: Interactional constraints on representational form. Cognitive Science, 31(2), 285-309.

Scott-Phillips, T. C., Kirby, S., & Ritchie, G. R. S. (2007). Signalling Signalhood: An Exploratory Study into the Emergence of Communicative Intentions. Paper presented at the ESSLLI 2007 Workshop on Language, Games and Evolution, Bielefeld.

Selten, R., & Warglien, M. (2007). The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(18), 7361-7366.