The Symbol Grounding Problem Has Been Solved. So What’s Next?

This chapter briefly discusses the issues of symbols, meanings, and embodiment. It explains the solution to the symbol grounding problem. It illustrates the ingredients that are employed in the experiments about language emergence using a specific example of a color guessing game. It argues that these experiments show that there is an effective solution to […]

The Robot in the Mirror

Humans maintain a body image of themselves, which plays a central role in controlling bodily movement, planning action, recognising and naming actions performed by others, and requesting or executing commands. This paper explores through experiments with autonomous humanoid robots how such a body image could form. Robots play a situated embodied language game called the […]

Flexible Word Meanings in Embodied Agents

Learning the meanings of words requires coping with referential uncertainty ? a learner hearing a novel word cannot be sure which aspects or properties of the referred object or event comprise the meaning of the word. Data from developmental psychology suggest that human learners grasp the important aspects of many novel words after just a […]

The Emergence of Semantic Roles in Fluid Construction Grammar

This paper shows how experiments on artificial language evolution can provide highly relevant results for important debates in linguistic theories. It reports on a series of experiments that investigate how semantic roles can emerge in a population of artificial embodied agents and how these agents can build a network of constructions. The experiment also includes […]

Typological and Computational Investigations of Spatial Perspective

This paper is part of an ongoing research program to understand the cognitive and functional bases for the origins and evolution of spatial language. Following a cognitive-functional approach, we first investigate the cross-linguistic variety in spatial language, with special attention for spatial perspective. Based on this language-typological data, we hypothesize which cognitive mechanisms are needed […]