Discovering communication through ontogenetic ritualisation

Spranger, Michael; Steels, Luc

doi:10.1109/devlrn.2014.6982948

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Recent work by Rossano and colleagues (Halina, Rossano & Tomasello, 2013;Rossano, under review) has not only shown evidence for this process in the gestural development of young bonobos, but also shown how fast this process can be, contrary to general expectations (as fast as 2 or 3 weeks, according to Rossano, under review). Arbib and colleagues have further shown that this process is computationally plausible once dyadic brain modeling and mirror neurons are taken into account (Arbib et al, 2014) and roboticists have shown that it is easier for robots to converge on a shared communicative repertoire by relying on ontogenetic ritualization than on imitation (Spranger & Steels, 2014).…”

Section: Social Manipulation Mind-reading Ontogenetic Ritualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social manipulation, turn-taking and cooperation in apes

Rossano

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper outlines how the focus on how communicative signals might emerge and how the capacity to interpret them might develop, does not yet explain what type of motivation is required to actually deal with those signals. Without the consistent production of appropriate responses to the production of communicative signals, there would be no point in producing any signal. If language is a tool to accomplish things with others, we need to understand what would lead to cooperation. The first step consists in avoiding the blind belief that all cooperation requires some prosocial attitude. A great deal of cooperation can occur while each participant in the interaction is selfishly attempting to maximize their own benefits or minimizing damaging consequences.I describe how different types of turn-taking can be achieved via different levels of cognitive complexity and how interpretive turn-taking requires a great deal of cognitive abilities that great apes possess. Finally, I provide empirical evidence of social manipulation in non-human primates. Given our awareness of the occurrence of social manipulation during cooperation among human adults, it seems necessary to reconsider to what degree human communication and language evolution require unique prosocial motivations.

show abstract

Section: Social Manipulation Mind-reading Ontogenetic Ritualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social manipulation, turn-taking and cooperation in apes

Rossano

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To this end, experiments on human-robot interaction conducted by (Gross and Krenn, 2016) have illustrated the way in which factors such as gaze and gesture are crucial features of early-stage linguistic interactions, and we suggest that a mechanism for representing these elements of communication is an important consideration in modelling grounded language learning. Likewise with a focus on robotic applications, Spranger and Steels (2014) have explored the way that the ontogentic ritualisation inherent in the phenotype of a community of language users plays an important role in human language learning.…”

Section: What Next?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Affordances in Grounded Language Learning

McGregor¹,

Lim²

2018

Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present a novel methodology involving mappings between different modes of semantic representations. We propose distributional semantic models as a mechanism for representing the kind of world knowledge inherent in the system of abstract symbols characteristic of a sophisticated community of language users. Then, motivated by insight from ecological psychology, we describe a model approximating affordances, by which we mean a language learner's direct perception of opportunities for action in an environment. We present a preliminary experiment involving mapping between these two representational modalities, and propose that our methodology can become the basis for a cognitively inspired model of grounded language learning.

show abstract

“…Many researchers have argued that gestural signs must have been the first stage in the origins of symbolic communication in our species as well [14], partly because closely related species, in particular chimpanzees and bonobos, also develop gestural signs among close kin [15]. Various agent-based models have tried to emulate this stage, mostly based on operationalizing ontogenetic ritualization [16][17][18]. (ii) From sounds to words.…”

Section: Stages In Language Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agent-based models for the emergence and evolution of grammar

Steels¹

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

One contribution of 13 to a theme issue 'The major synthetic evolutionary transitions'.Subject Areas: computational biology, evolution Keywords: language evolution, grammaticalization, emergence of grammar, fluid construction grammar, agent-based models, major transitions in evolution Author for correspondence: Luc Steels e-mail: steels@arti.vub.ac.be Agent-based models for the emergence and evolution of grammar Luc Steels ICREA, IBE-Universitat Pompeu Fabra and CSIC, 08003 Barcelona, Spain LS, 0000-0001-9134-3663Human languages are extraordinarily complex adaptive systems. They feature intricate hierarchical sound structures, are able to express elaborate meanings and use sophisticated syntactic and semantic structures to relate sound to meaning. What are the cognitive mechanisms that speakers and listeners need to create and sustain such a remarkable system? What is the collective evolutionary dynamics that allows a language to self-organize, become more complex and adapt to changing challenges in expressive power? This paper focuses on grammar. It presents a basic cycle observed in the historical language record, whereby meanings move from lexical to syntactic and then to a morphological mode of expression before returning to a lexical mode, and discusses how we can discover and validate mechanisms that can cause these shifts using agent-based models.This article is part of the themed issue 'The major synthetic evolutionary transitions'. Stages in language evolutionA human language is a remarkable, highly complex communication system. The capacity for language, the so-called language-ready brain [1], uniquely emerged in the hominin species, perhaps being in place as far back as half a million years ago [2]. Since then, languages have been born, and existing languages have kept changing, diversifying and dying. How can we develop a scientific understanding of the emergence and continuous cultural evolution of such a highly complex system? Analogous to a successful strategy in evolutionary biology [3], we could postulate different stages for the emergence of language in a population with language-ready brains, based on criteria related to the complexity of the meanings that can be conveyed and the complexity of the structures and linguistic forms available to express them.To study how complexity at each stage arises and what is required to see transitions between stages, we could adopt the synthetic method, which is being used increasingly in many scientific fields, particularly biology [4], but also fields studying culturally evolving systems, such as sociology [5] or archaeology [6]. This method suggests that we should build operational models that generate analogous behaviours to those observed in the natural system we want to understand, similar to the way an aeroplane can be said to exhibit a similar capacity to fly as birds and hence informs us about what it takes to fly. In the case of language, the operational models take the form of a population of artificial agents which are initialized with a set of ...

show abstract

Discovering communication through ontogenetic ritualisation

Cited by 7 publications

References 22 publications

Social manipulation, turn-taking and cooperation in apes

Social manipulation, turn-taking and cooperation in apes

Affordances in Grounded Language Learning

Agent-based models for the emergence and evolution of grammar

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About