The Impact of Motor Action on Language Acquisition and Action-Verb Learning in a Robot

Abstract

In humans, the acquisition of a new motor skill is associated with the development of a wide range of cognitive areas and can create contexts in which new cognitive capacities develop. Motor development is linked to language development in infants, as crawling and walking promote active exploration of the environment, while manipulating objects and pointing draw the caregiver’s attention and help establish joint attention. Together, these motor experiences broaden communication contexts and support the learning of nouns (object-based words) and verbs (action-based words). However, many questions remain unanswered about how children's actions influence language development, qualitatively and quantitatively, and how they help the acquisition of different types of words, particularly the learning of verbs. In this paper, we propose a robot architecture to study how gestures can affect early language learning. The architecture follows the developmental robotics paradigm, i.e. inspired by the way human children develop and acquire language according to multiple developmental theories. The experimental results demonstrate that enabling the robot to produce gestures expands its vocabulary size and facilitates the acquisition of verbs. These results are in line with the finding that verb learning lags behind noun learning since the acquisition of verbs depends more on motor abilities and requires the maturation of motor development.