The paper proposes a set of principles and a general architecture that may explain how language and meaning may originate and complexify in a group of physically grounded distributed agents. An experimental setup is introduced for concretising and validating specific mechanisms based on these principles. The setup consists of two robotic heads that watch a scene in which a robot moves around in its ecosystem. The first results from experiments showing the emergence of distinctions, of a lexicon, and of primitive syntactic structures are reported. 1 Introduction Artificial Intelligence research has made remarkable progress the last decades by showing how operations over symbolic models may explain various aspects of intelligent behavior, such as planning, problem solving, natural language processing, etc. However, the problem of the origin of these symbolic models has so far not been adequately addressed. Most of the time it is the programmer who designs formalisms and datastructures, ...

The paper reports on experiments in which robotic agents and software agents are set up to originate language and meaning. The experiments test the hypothesis that mechanisms for generating complexity commonly found in biosystems, in particular self-organisation, co-evolution, and level formation, also may explain the spontaneous formation, adaptation, and growth in complexity of language.

An account of grammatical acquisition is developed within the parametersetting framework applied to a generalized categorial grammar (GCG). The GCG is embedded in a default inheritance network yielding a natural partial ordering (reflecting generality) of parameters which determines a partial order for parameter setting. Computational simulation shows that several resulting acquisition procedures are effective on a parameter set expressing major typological distinctions based on constituent order, and defining 70 distinct full languages and over 200 subset languages. The effects on acquisition of inductive bias, that is, of differing initial parameter settings, are explored via computational simulation. Computational simulation of populations of language learners and users instantiating the acquisition model show: 1) that variant acquisition procedures, with differing inductive biases, exert differing selective pressures on the evolution of language(s); 2) acquisition proc...

There is an active debate within the field of phonology concerning the cognitive status of substantive phonetic factors such as ease of articulation and perceptual distinctiveness. A new framework is proposed in which substance acts as a bias, or prior, on phonological learning. Two experiments tested this framework with a method in which participants are first provided highly impoverished evidence of a new phonological pattern, and then tested on how they extend this pattern to novel contexts and novel sounds. Participants were found to generalize velar palatalization (e.g., the change from [k]asinkeep to [t�ʃ]asincheap) in a way that accords with linguistic typology, and that is predicted by a cognitive bias in favor of changes that relate perceptually similar sounds. Velar palatalization was extended from the mid front vowel context (i.e., before [e]asincape) to the high front vowel context (i.e., before [i]asin keep), but not vice versa. The key explanatory notion of perceptual similarity is quantified with a psychological model of categorization, and the substantively biased framework is formalized as a conditional random field. Implications of these results for the debate on substance, theories of phonological generalization, and the formalization of similarity are discussed.

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this paper I re-examine the case for distinguishing language-specific phonetics from phonology, and concludes that this move is unmotivated. It is feasible to account for 4 phonetic and phonological phenomena within a unified framework, and such a model is better able to account for the many similarities between phonetics and phonology. It is appropriate to distinguish components of grammar where the representations and principles operative in each component are fundamentally distinct, thus it is uncontroversial to distinguish phonology from syntax. It is difficult to justify a distinction between phonetics and phonology on these grounds. Phonetics and phonology are not obviously distinguished by the nature of the representations involved, or in terms of the phenomena they encompass. As far as representation is concerned, most of the primitives of phonological representation remain phonetically-based in the sense that features and timing units are provided with broadly phonetic definitions. This has the peculiar consequence that sound is represented twice in grammar: Once at a coarse level of detail in the phonology, and then again at a finer grain in the phonetics. Perhaps more significant is the fact that there are also substantial similarities between many phenomena which are conventionally classified as phonetic and those which are conventionally classified as phonological, for example coarticulation is similar in many respects to assimilation. The aim of this paper is to explore the idea that these parallels are best accounted for by analyzing both `phonetic' and `phonological' phenomena within a unified framework so the similar properties of the two can be derived from the same constraints. Unifying phonetics and phonology does not imply a denial of the distinct...

The goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between vowel height and nasalization, a relationship that argues rather directly for the importance to phonological patterning of the perceptual distinctiveness of contrast. It thus adds to the list of cases making this point (see Flemming 1995, and also N Chiosin and Padgett 1997 for others), and strengthens the case for an output-oriented conception of contrast: in order for the perceptual distinctiveness of a contrast to be evaluated at the surface, contrast itself must be discernable by constraints at the surface

In this paper we present an approach to modeling emergent syllable systems using simulated evolution of a "vocabulary" of "words." The model is aimed at testing the general hypothesis that language-universal sound patterns emerge from selection pressures exerted on the system by the perceptual and articulatory constraints of language users. The model is able to distinguish between hypotheses about how specific, biologicallymotivated constraints affect the sound structure of language. For example, it is shown that mandibular oscillation provides a strong constraint on the sequential organization of phonemes into words. Future work will explore the potential of other constraints that, with mandibular oscillation, will be sufficient to describe the emergence of syllable systems. Introduction Although much variability exists in the sound structures of languages, there are a number of common patterns. Several independent statements can be made that capture these universal (or highly freque...

This paper gives an Optimality-Theoretic formalization of several aspects of the acquisition of phonological perception in a second language. The subject matter will be the acquisition of the Spanish vowel system by Dutch learners of Spanish, as evidenced in a listening experiment. Since an explanation of the learners ’ acquisition path requires knowledge of both the Dutch and the Spanish vowel system, the 12 Dutch and 5 Spanish vowels are presented in Figure 1. Along the vertical axis we find the auditory correlate of perceptual vowel height (first formant, F1), and along the horizontal axis the auditory correlate of perceptual vowel backness (second formant, F2), whose articulatory correlates are tongue backness and lip rounding. A third auditory dimension, duration, is implicit in the length sign (“!”) used for 4 of the 12 Dutch vowels.

this paper is to motivate a model of phonetic realization which bears substantial similarities to optimality theoretic (OT) phonology (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) in that the phonetic output is optimized with respect to conflicting, violable constraints. However, we will see that the mechanism for the resolution of constraint conflicts must employ numerically weighted constraints rather than the strict constraint domination assumed in OT phonology.