Project Summary
This is an international, multi-disciplinary research project on
cultural selforganisation in the origins of grammar. The project
brings together members from key disciplines relevant to modelling the
evolution of language: linguistics, neuroscience, psychology,
artificial intelligence, and complex systems. The main hypothesis of
the project is that language has emerged and continues to evolve as a
cultural selectionist system. This means that generic cognitive
abilities, such as associative memory, structural processing,
categorisation, etc. have been recruited for language, and that the
language system complexifies and changes in the process of cultural
transmission. Coherence of a language in a community and the spreading
of new features is hypothesised to be due to self-organisation.
This functionalist and cultural evolution hypothesis is clearly in
radical opposition to the popular hypothesis of a genetic encoding and
origin of the "language instinct". However it is standard
scientific practice to examine opponent hypotheses and to gather
evidence for each. It is only by examining the cultural evolution
hypothesis seriously that we can see the necessity for a strong
genetic determination of language, or the degree thereof. For the
project we have chosen a number of phenomena for which a large amount
of cross-linguistic data exists and for which grammaticalisation
processes have been studied. They will concern case, aspect, and
determiner systems. The language processing, cognitive architecture,
and sensori-motor components required for these phenomena will be
studied and simulations will be set up that show how language
constructs can emerge. We intend to show that the investigated
linguistic phenomena can be explained in terms of cognitive
constraints, task constraints, constraints on human brain
architecture, and embodiment, rather than through innate genetic
determinism.
The primary aim of the Brussels AI-Laboratory in this project is to
set up a number of concrete experiments in which artificial, robotic
agents develop autonomously a shared communication system that has
characteristics of human natural language. The robots will do this by
engaging in a series of language games about situations in the real
world, which they perceive, categorise, and conceptualise. The robots
will be given the necessary sensori-motoric abilities, as well as
components for the use, acquisition and invention of language. Each
experiment should show a qualitative correspondence with established,
empirical observations in natural language, and thus show the
sufficiency of the components introduced for getting the desired
language behaviour. We realise that this aim is very ambitious but
recent advances in all sub-fields concerned, particularly in the
domain of humanoid robotics, give grounds for optimism. Moreover, a
series of experiments in the domain of lexical evolution have already
shown the way. This project will carry further these prior results and
the used methodology, involving both computer modelling and robotic
modelling, into the domain of grammar. One important spin-off of the
project will be a set of tools for carrying out experiments in
language evolution that will be made accessible to the research
community at large. These tools include computational frameworks for
modelling evolving grammars, a "teleportation" infrastructure
for carrying out experiments at multiple sites, and various kinds of
monitoring tools that quantify language evolution, such as
communicative success, coherence, spreading or cumulative change.
Funding
The funding for the project will be provided by the
FWO, the Flemish fund for
scientific research, within the framework of the
European Science Foundation program
on the Origins of man, language and languages.
Duration
2002-2006 (48 months)
Partners
Collaborating research groups
- VUB AI Lab Brussels, Prof. Luc Steels
The VUB AI Lab will be responsible for the main robotic set-up on
which other groups will be able to execute experiments. They will also
work on the computational framework for the grammar and the execution
of various experiments. Particularly, the experiments for the
emergence of a determiner and aspect system will be studied.
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives (Lyon, France), Dr. Peter F. Dominey
This group will be responsible for introducing neural realism into
the agent's cognitive architectures in order to examine precisely
which architectural characteristics might be responsible for certain
universal tendencies of grammar. The group will also examine
conceptual categorisation in some specific domains, particular the
categorisation of action.
- Department of Communication Science (Sienna, Italy),
Prof. Castelfranchi
This group will be responsible on the one side for developing the
theoretical foundations of evolutionary language games by linking to
models developed in economics and biology; on the other side for a
model of the evolution of tacit conventions, implicit communication
and agreements as a basis for "negotiating" linguistic rules.
- Institut für Afrikanistik (Cologne, Germany) / Anglistic III (Düsseldorf, Germany), Prof. Heine, Prof. Kouteva
This group's role in the project will be to catalog universal
properties of case systems, aspect systems, and determiners and to
provide information on grammaticalisation processes as observed in the
world's languages. These results will be a target for the computer
simulations and robotic experiments carried out by the other partners.
- Cognitive Science (Lund, Sweden), Dr Balkenius
The Lund team will be carrying out experiments in grounded language
evolution on robotic agents, in strong collaboration with the Brussels
team. Some of the components they have already developed are crucial
for developing complete agent systems.
Associated research groups
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig,
Germany), Prof. Tomasello
- Departamento de Filología Inglesa (Murcia, Spain), Dr. Javier Valenzuela
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen,
Netherlands), Prof. Bowerman
To top of page
