TY - JOUR
T1 - Robots that Say ‘No’. Affective Symbol Grounding and the Case of Intent Interpretations
AU - Foerster, Frank
AU - Saunders, Joe
AU - Nehaniv, Chrystopher
N1 - © 2017 IEEE. This article has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.
PY - 2018/9/1
Y1 - 2018/9/1
N2 - Modern theories on early child language acquisition tend to focus on referential words, mostly nouns, labeling concrete objects, or physical properties. In this experimental proof-of-concept study, we show how nonreferential negation words, typically belonging to a child's first ten words, may be acquired. A child-like humanoid robot is deployed in speech-wise unconstrained interaction with naïve human participants. In agreement with psycholinguistic observations, we corroborate the hypothesis that affect plays a pivotal role in the socially distributed acquisition process where the adept conversation partner provides linguistic interpretations of the affective displays of the less adept speaker. Negation words are prosodically salient within intent interpretations that are triggered by the learner's display of affect. From there they can be picked up and used by the budding language learner which may involve the grounding of these words in the very affective states that triggered them in the first place. The pragmatic analysis of the robot's linguistic performance indicates that the correct timing of negative utterances is essential for the listener to infer the meaning of otherwise ambiguous negative utterances. In order to assess the robot's performance thoroughly comparative data from psycholinguistic studies of parent-child dyads is needed highlighting the need for further interdisciplinary work.
AB - Modern theories on early child language acquisition tend to focus on referential words, mostly nouns, labeling concrete objects, or physical properties. In this experimental proof-of-concept study, we show how nonreferential negation words, typically belonging to a child's first ten words, may be acquired. A child-like humanoid robot is deployed in speech-wise unconstrained interaction with naïve human participants. In agreement with psycholinguistic observations, we corroborate the hypothesis that affect plays a pivotal role in the socially distributed acquisition process where the adept conversation partner provides linguistic interpretations of the affective displays of the less adept speaker. Negation words are prosodically salient within intent interpretations that are triggered by the learner's display of affect. From there they can be picked up and used by the budding language learner which may involve the grounding of these words in the very affective states that triggered them in the first place. The pragmatic analysis of the robot's linguistic performance indicates that the correct timing of negative utterances is essential for the listener to infer the meaning of otherwise ambiguous negative utterances. In order to assess the robot's performance thoroughly comparative data from psycholinguistic studies of parent-child dyads is needed highlighting the need for further interdisciplinary work.
KW - Developmental robotics
KW - human-robot interaction
KW - language acquisition
KW - negation
KW - pragmatics
KW - psycholinguistics
KW - social robotics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85035798079&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TCDS.2017.2752366
DO - 10.1109/TCDS.2017.2752366
M3 - Article
SN - 2379-8920
VL - 10
SP - 530
EP - 544
JO - IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
JF - IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
IS - 3
M1 - 8120012
ER -