Abstract
One of the principal functions of human language is to allow people to coordinate joint action. This includes the description of events, requests for action, and their organization in time. A crucial component of language acquisition is learning the grammatical structures that allow the expression of such complex meaning related to physical events. The current research investigates the learning of grammatical constructions and their temporal organization in the context of human-robot physical interaction with the embodied sensorimotor humanoid platform, the iCub. We demonstrate three noteworthy phenomena. First, a recurrent network model is used in conjunction with this robotic platform to learn the mappings between grammatical forms and predicate-argument representations of meanings related to events, and the robot's execution of these events in time. Second, this learning mechanism functions in the inverse sense, i.e., in a language production mode, where rather than executing commanded actions, the robot will describe the results of human generated actions. Finally, we collect data from naïve subjects who interact with the robot via spoken language, and demonstrate significant learning and generalization results. This allows us to conclude that such a neural language learning system not only helps to characterize and understand some aspects of human language acquisition, but also that it can be useful in adaptive human-robot interaction.
Highlights
ISSUES IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION The ability to learn any human language is a marvelous demonstration of adaptation
What is novel here is that the model we use is a neural network model of language comprehension and
Closed class words indicated in bold have a specific function and the system has to learn it without any additional feature to treat these special words
Summary
ISSUES IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION The ability to learn any human language is a marvelous demonstration of adaptation. As the child is situated in the environment, it has access to massive non-linguistic information that can aid in constraining the possible meanings of phonemes, words or sentences that it hears (Dominey and Dodane, 2004). In this context, social interaction is clearly an important factor that helps the child to acquire language, by focusing its attention on the same object or event as the person he is interacting with via joint attention. Joint attention happens sufficiently often to assume it as one of the reliable ways to help the child to acquire language: for instance when playing a game, showing an object, ritualized situations including bathing and feeding, etc. (Carpenter et al, 1998; Ricciardelli et al, 2002; Tomasello, 2003; Dominey and Dodane, 2004; Sebanz et al, 2006; Knoblich and Sebanz, 2008; Tomasello and Hamann, 2012)
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