The evolution of grounded spatial language

✍ Scribed by Michael Spranger

• Publisher: Language Science Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 283
• Series: Computational Models of Language Evolution 5
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book presents groundbreaking robotic experiments on how and why spatial language evolves. It provides detailed explanations of the origins of spatial conceptualization strategies, spatial categories, landmark systems and spatial grammar by tracing the interplay of environmental conditions, communicative and cognitive pressures. The experiments discussed in this book go far beyond previous approaches in grounded language evolution. For the first time, agents can evolve not only particular lexical systems but also evolve complex conceptualization strategies underlying the emergence of category systems and compositional semantics. Moreover, many issues in cognitive science, ranging from perception and conceptualization to language processing, had to be dealt with to instantiate these experiments, so that this book contributes not only to the study of language evolution but to the investigation of the cognitive bases of spatial language as well  Read more...

✦ Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Part I: Spatial language games and technical background

1. Grounded spatial language games
2. Embodied cognitive semantics with IRL
3. Construction Grammar with FCG

Part II: Reconstructing German locative phrases

1. German locative phrases — an introduction
2. Spatial semantics
3. Syntactic processing
4. Semantic processing
5. A whole system approach to processing

Part III: Spatial language evolution

1. Evolution of basic spatial category systems
2. Evolution of spatial conceptualization strategies
3. Multi-word lexical systems for expressing landmarks
4. Function and evolution of locative spatial grammar

Part IV: Conclusion

1. Conclusion and future work