THE ORIGINS OF SYNTAX IN VISUALLY GROUNDED ROBOTIC AGENTS

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 set up is introduced for concretising and validating specific mechanisms b ased on these principles. The setup consists of two robotic heads that watch static or dynamic scenes and engage in language games, in which one robot describes to the other what they see. The first results fro m experiments showing the emergence of distinctions, of a lexicon, and of primitive syntactic structures are reported. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.