Proceedings :: Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
2001
The emergence of wordsPDF
Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2001
Abstract Children change in their word-learning abilities sometime during the second year of life. The nature of this behavioral change has been taken to suggest an underlying change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more purely symbolic form of learning. We ...
How nouns and verbs differentially affect the behavior of artificial organismsPDF
Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 170-175, 2001
This paper presents an Artificial Life and Neural Network (ALNN) model for the evolution of syntax. The simulation methodology provides a unifying approach for the study of the evolution of language and its interaction with other behavioral and neural factors. The model uses an ...MORE ⇓
This paper presents an Artificial Life and Neural Network (ALNN) model for the evolution of syntax. The simulation methodology provides a unifying approach for the study of the evolution of language and its interaction with other behavioral and neural factors. The model uses an object manipulation task to simulate the evolution of language based on a simple verb-noun rule. The analyses of results focus on the interaction between language and other non-linguistic abilities, and on the neural control of linguistic abilities. The model shows that the beneficial effects of language on non-linguistic behavior are explained by the emergence of distinct internal representation patterns for the processing of verbs and nouns.
The Origins of Syllable Systems: An Operational ModelPDF
Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 744-749, 2001
Many models, computational or not, exist that describe the acquisition of speech: they all rely on the pre-existence of some sort of linguistic structure in the input, i.e. speech itself. Very few address the question of how this coherence and structure appeared. We try here to ...MORE ⇓
Many models, computational or not, exist that describe the acquisition of speech: they all rely on the pre-existence of some sort of linguistic structure in the input, i.e. speech itself. Very few address the question of how this coherence and structure appeared. We try here to give a solution concerning syllable systems. We propose an operational model that shows how a society of robotic of agents, endowed with a set of non-linguistically specific motor, perceptual, cognitive and social constraints (some of them are obstacles whereas others are opportunities), can collectively build a coherent and structured syllable system from scratch. As opposed to many existing abstract models of the origins of language, as few shortcuts as possible were taken in the way the constraints are implemented. The structural properties of the produced sound systems are extensively studied under the light of phonetics and phonology and more broadly language theory. The model brings more plausibility in favor of theories of language that defend the idea that there needs no innate linguistic specific abilities to explain observed regularities in world languages.