Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics

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Emerging Linguistic Functions in Early Infancy

This paper presents results from experimental studies on early language acquisition in infants and attempts to interpret the experimental results within the framework of the Ecological Theory of Language Acquisition (ETLA) recently proposed by (Lacerda et al., 2004a). From this perspective, the infant’s first steps in the acquisition of the ambient language are seen as a consequence of the infant’s general capacity to represent sensory input and the infant’s interaction with other actors in its immediate ecological environment. On the basis of available experimental evidence, it will be argued that ETLA offers a productive alternative to traditional descriptive views of the language acquisition process by presenting an operative model of how early linguistic function may emerge through interaction

Fooling the eyes: the influence of a sound-induced visual motion illusion on eye movements

The question of whether perceptual illusions influence eye movements is critical for the long-standing debate regarding the separation between action and perception. To test the role of auditory context on a visual illusion and on eye movements, we took advantage of the fact that the presence of an auditory cue can successfully modulate illusory motion perception of an otherwise static flickering object (sound-induced visual motion effect). We found that illusory motion perception modulated by an auditory context consistently affected saccadic eye movements. Specifically, the landing positions of saccades performed towards flickering static bars in the periphery were biased in the direction of illusory motion. Moreover, the magnitude of this bias was strongly correlated with the effect size of the perceptual illusion. These results show that both an audio-visual and a purely visual illusion can significantly affect visuo-motor behavior. Our findings are consistent with arguments for a tight link between perception and action in localization tasks

Self-Supervised Vision-Based Detection of the Active Speaker as Support for Socially-Aware Language Acquisition

This paper presents a self-supervised method for visual detection of the active speaker in a multi-person spoken interaction scenario. Active speaker detection is a fundamental prerequisite for any artificial cognitive system attempting to acquire language in social settings. The proposed method is intended to complement the acoustic detection of the active speaker, thus improving the system robustness in noisy conditions. The method can detect an arbitrary number of possibly overlapping active speakers based exclusively on visual information about their face. Furthermore, the method does not rely on external annotations, thus complying with cognitive development. Instead, the method uses information from the auditory modality to support learning in the visual domain. This paper reports an extensive evaluation of the proposed method using a large multi-person face-to-face interaction dataset. The results show good performance in a speaker dependent setting. However, in a speaker independent setting the proposed method yields a significantly lower performance. We believe that the proposed method represents an essential component of any artificial cognitive system or robotic platform engaging in social interactions.Comment: 10 pages, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental System