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Steels, L. (2000) Mirror Neurons and the Action Theory of Language Origins. In Architectures of the Mind, Architectures of the Brain.
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Paper at a Glance 

MIRROR NEURONS AND THE ACTION THEORY OF LANGUAGE ORIGINS
Luc Steels
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (AI Lab) and
Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris 6 Rue Amyot 75005 Paris
tel: 33­1­44 08 05 05
fax: 33­1­45­87­87­50
email: steels@arti.vub.ac.be
a. Introduction and Goal The research reported here attempts to understand how language may have originated from sensori­motor competences. Recently the observation of mirror neurons [1] has lead to the suggestion that there is not only a rich representation of motor action but also that this representation is used for multiple purposes: action execution, action planning, action imaging, and action recognition. Of particular importance is the observation that one agent can recognise an action plan of another one and that the same neurons are involved. The relevance of this for the origins of language has been pointed out by Rizzolatti and Arbib [2]. Here we go a step further, arguing that the meaning of a language utterance in general is a series of physical or mental actions that the speaker wants the hearer to perform, rather than a declarative statement to be stored whose only relevance are its truth conditions. For example, when a speaker says "Can you give me the black box on the table?", he wants the hearer to hand over an object (which means to grasp it and move it in the direction of the speaker). To know which object is involved, the speaker wants the hearer to direct his or her attention to a table in the shared context, to identify the objects which can be compared to the prototype of a box, and then focus on the one box which has a black colour. These mental actions are as situated and grounded as motor actions like grasping. From this action­oriented view of language semantics, language understanding amounts to the recognition of the plan intended by the hearer and the utterance is seen as giving hints about which plan is intended. The production of an utterance can also be seen as involving the contruction of an ...
BibTex
@incollection{steels00mirrorNeurons,
  author={L. Steels},
  title={Mirror Neurons and the Action Theory of Language Origins},
  year={2000},
  publisher={},
  booktitle={Architectures of the Mind, Architectures of the Brain},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/steels00mirrorNeurons.html},
  keywords={mirror neurons, evolutionary linguistics}
}

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