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The emergence of communication in evolutionary robots
Davide Marocco1, Angelo Cangelosi, Stefano Nolfi
1Centro Interdipartimentale della Comunicazione, Università della Calabria, Via P Bucci, Arcavacata di Rende (CS), Italy. davidem@ip.rm.cnr.it
Summary
Evolutionary robotics simulations show that environmental interaction and categorization are key for communication and language evolution. Nouns appear to precede verbs, supporting language origin theories.
Area of Science:
- Robotics
- Evolutionary Computation
- Linguistics
Background:
- Evolutionary robotics offers a biologically inspired framework for studying communication evolution.
- Existing models explore communication emergence but require further development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and test a novel evolutionary robotics model for the emergence of communication.
- To investigate the relationship between communication abilities and other behavioral skills.
- To test hypotheses regarding the origins of language, specifically the noun-verb order.
Main Methods:
- Two simulation experiments were conducted using evolutionary robots.
- Simulation 1: Studied the emergence of simple signaling behavior and its relation to categorization and communication abilities.
- Simulation 2: Investigated the emergence of simple syntactic categories (e.g., action names) in evolutionary robots.
Main Results:
- Categorization from environmental interaction provides a foundation for communication and language evolution.
- The signaling lexicon in Simulation 1 exhibited an evolutionary pattern consistent with nouns.
- Results support the hypothesis that nouns precede verbs in both evolutionary and developmental contexts.
Conclusions:
- The developed evolutionary robotics model effectively simulates communication and language emergence.
- Findings support key hypotheses on language origins, particularly the precedence of nouns over verbs.
- The model provides a platform for further research into the evolution of communication and language.
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