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Robot Babies

What can they teach us about language acquisition?

  • Chapter
Ecology of Language Acquisition

Part of the book series: Educational Linguistics ((EDUL,volume 1))

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence, like traditional linguistics and computational linguistics, tends to treat language as an isolated phenomenon, and syntax and semantics as separate areas of study. The approach taken to developing grammars, parsers and natural language systems has been more like the dissection of a cadaver than a study of live interactions in a complex ecology: the basic anatomical structure can be discovered and some educated guesses made about the physiological interactions, but there is no hope of understanding the functional operation of a system that involves multiple individuals living in a complex environment. In fact, natural language research has been even more hampered, as computer scientists ignored the collective wisdom of linguistics, psychology, and sociology, and relied on their own intuitions rather than real world data about language in action.

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Authors
  1. David Powers
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jonathan Leather  & Jet van Dam  & 

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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Powers, D. (2002). Robot Babies. In: Leather, J., van Dam, J. (eds) Ecology of Language Acquisition. Educational Linguistics, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0341-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0341-3_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6170-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-017-0341-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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