Symbol Grounding and the Origin of Language: From Show to Tell

Blondin Massé, A. (Alexandre); Harnad, Stevan; Picard, Olivier et St-Louis, Bernard (2013). « Symbol Grounding and the Origin of Language: From Show to Tell », dans Current Perspective on the Origins of Language, sous la dir. de Lefebvre, C.; Comrie, B. et Cohen, H.. Royaume-Uni, Benjamin.

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Résumé

Organisms’ adaptive success depends on being able to do the right thing with the right kind of thing. This is categorization. Most species can learn categories by direct experience (induction). Only human beings can acquire categories by word of mouth (instruction). Artificial-life simulations show the evolutionary advantage of instruction over induction, human electrophysiology experiments show that the two ways of acquiring categories still share some common features, and graph-theoretic analyses show that dictionaries consist of a core of more concrete words that are learned earlier, from direct experience, and the meanings of the rest of the dictionary can be learned from definition alone, by combining the core words into subject/predicate propositions with truth values. Language began when purposive miming became conventionalized into arbitrary sequences of shared category names describing and defining new categories via propositions.

Type: Chapitre de livre
Mots-clés ou Sujets: Accès libre, dépôt institutionnel, mandats édition scientifique
Unité d'appartenance: Faculté des sciences humaines > Département de psychologie
Déposé par: Stevan Harnad
Date de dépôt: 03 déc. 2014 14:16
Dernière modification: 03 déc. 2014 14:16
Adresse URL : http://archipel.uqam.ca/id/eprint/6434

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