Embodied compositionality. Comment on "Modeling the cultural evolution of language" by Luc Steels.

Abstract

Luc Steels [10] provides a comprehensive overview of the key theoretical issues on the cultural evolution of language and of the contribution of computational and robotics models to the study of the social emergence of language in societies of interactive agents. In this short commentary, I would like to extend the discussion by focusing: (i) on the origins of the hierarchical structure of language, as grounded in the embodied compositional nature of motor representations and skills such as those of object manipulation; and (ii) on the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution processes in language evolution.