tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Constructivist Development of Grounded Construction Grammars"

The paper reports on progress in building computational models of a constructivist approach to language development. It introduces a formalism for construction grammars and learning strategies based on invention, abduction, and induction. Examples are drawn from experiments exercising the model in situated language games played by embodied artificial agents. b | Constructivist Development of Grounded Construction Grammars Luc Steels University of Brussels VUB AI Lab SONY Computer Science Lab - Paris 6 Rue Amyot 75005 Paris steels@ Abstract The paper reports on progress in building computational models of a constructivist approach to language development. It introduces a formalism for construction grammars and learning strategies based on invention abduction and induction. Examples are drawn from experiments exercising the model in situated language games played by embodied artificial agents. 1 Introduction The constructivist approach to language learning proposes that children acquire linguistic competence . only gradually beginning with more concrete linguistic structures based on particular words and morphemes and then building up to more abstract and productive structures based on various types of linguistic categories schemas and constructions. TomaselloBrooks 1999 p. 161. The approach furthermore assumes that language development is i grounded in cognition because prior to or in a co-development with language there is an understanding and conceptualisation of scenes in terms of events objects roles that objects play in events and perspectives on the event and ii grounded in communication because language learning is intimately embedded in interactions with specific communicative goals. In contrast to the nativist position defended for example by Pinker Pinker 1998 the constructivist approach does not assume that the semantic and syntactic categories as well as the linking rules specifying for example that the agent of an action is linked to the subject of a sentence are universal and innate. Rather semantic and syntactic categories as well as the way they are linked is built up in a gradual developmental process starting from quite specific verb-island constructions . Although the constructivist approach appears to explain a lot of the known empirical data about child language acquisition there is so far