Evolutionary Origins of Action and Language Compositionality Sample Clauses

Evolutionary Origins of Action and Language Compositionality. ‌ The relationship between language and action is particularly important when we consider the striking similarities and parallels that have been demonstrated to exist between the linguistic structure and the organization of action knowledge. As discussed in section 3, action knowledge can be organized into compositional and hierarchical components. Language has two core characteristics: Compositionality and Recursion. Compositionality refers to the fact that a series of basic linguistic components (i.e. word categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.) can be combined together to construct meaningful sentences. Recursion refers to the fact that these words and sentences can be recursively combined to express new sentences and meanings. These mechanisms create a parallel between the structure of language and that of meaning (including sensorimotor representations). When considering such remarkable similarities between language and action, some fundamental questions arise: Why do language and action share such hierarchical and compositional structure and properties? Is there a univocal relationship between them (e.g. the structure of action influences that of language, or vice versa), or do they affect each other in a reciprocal way? Do these two abilities share common evolutionary, and/or developmental, processes? These scientific questions will be investigated through new robotic experiments based on the combination of evolutionary algorithms and ontogenetic/developmental learning algorithms. These experiments will be based on robotic simulations due to time constraints involved in evolutionary computation (i.e. parallel testing of many robots within one generation, to be repeated for hundred of selection/reproduction cycles). Experiment will directly address some of the language origins hypotheses on action/language interaction. For example, one study will consider Corballis (2002) hypothesis that language evolved from the primates’ ability to use and make tools and the corresponding cognitive representation that such a compositional behavior requires. Evolutionary simulations will first look at the evolution of tool use and object manipulation capabilities. Subsequently, agents will be allowed to communicate about their action and object repertoire. The analysis of evolutionary advantages in pre- evolving object manipulation capability will be considered. Another simulation will consider Greenfield’s (1991) study on sequential sorting behavior and i...