ABSTRACT
The effects of adjustments in teaching strategy and of paralanguage information in speech sound on the meaning acquisition process were determined by means of an experiment in which the game “Pong” was played by a team of two subjects. One subject (the teacher) coached the other one (the operator), instructing the operator in which direction to move the game paddle and when to hit the “ball.” However, the teacher’s speech was rendered linguistically incomprehensible. Three phenomena were observed. First, the use of a high-pitched voice by the teacher caused the operator to pay more attention to her/his actions. Second, meaning acquisition could be regarded as a reinforcement learning process based on a multi-reward system (i.e., one for successful game action and a different one from the teacher’s high-pitched voice for the wrong action). Third, the subjects adapted to each other; that is, they learned to respond more appropriately to each other’s behaviors (we call this mutual adaptation). These three phenomena are thought to play important roles in the acquisition of meaning from incomprehensible speech.
