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Anchoring Social Symbol Grounding in Children’s Interactions

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Abstract

In this article, we will discuss how computational social symbol grounding (i.e. how shared sets of symbols are grounded in multi-agent models) can be used to study children’s acquisition of word-meaning mappings. In order to use multi-agent modelling as a reliable tool to study human language acquisition, we argue that the simulations need to be anchored in observations of social interactions that children encounter “in the wild” and in different cultures. We discuss what aspects of such social interactions and cognitive mechanisms can and should be modelled, as well as how we intend to anchor this model to corpora containing features of children’s social behaviour as observed “in the wild” to mimic children’s (social) environment as reliably as possible. In addition, we discuss some challenges that need to be solved in order to construct the computational model. The resulting SCAFFOLD model will provide a benchmark for investigating socio-cognitive mechanisms of human social symbol grounding using computer simulations.

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Notes

  1. In contrast to earlier notions of anchoring (e.g., [3, 9]), we will use this notion to speak about connecting or grounding computational studies in empirical data. We use this term to distinguish from (symbol) grounding.

  2. Cultural And Social Aspects of Multimodal Interactions in Language Acquisition.

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Acknowledgements

The research presented in this article is funded by a Vidi grant awarded to the first author by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, grant no. 276-70-018). The authors are indebted to Wona Sanana and the Associação Communitario Ambiente de Mafalala for their assistance in recruiting the Mozambican participants, all Mozambican and Dutch research assistants for helping to collect and annotate the data, and all Mozambican and Dutch participants.

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  1. Tilburg centre for Cognition and Communication, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Paul Vogt & J. Douglas Mastin

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  1. Paul Vogt
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  2. J. Douglas Mastin
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Correspondence to Paul Vogt.

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Vogt, P., Mastin, J.D. Anchoring Social Symbol Grounding in Children’s Interactions. Künstl Intell 27, 145–151 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-013-0243-6

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