LANGUAGE AND THE MIRROR SYSTEM: A PERCEPTION/ACTION BASED APPROACH TO COMMUNICATIVE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract:

In answering "What are the sources from outside the self that inform what the child knows?", our basic idea is that a shared understanding of action grounds what individuals know in common. In particular, we root the ontogeny of language in the progression from action and gesture to speech or signed language. What then might the evolutionary path to language and the ontogeny of language in the child have in common? We can characterize the source of the emergence of language in both as arising from perceiving and acting, leading to gesture, and eventually to speech or signed language. Rizzolatti & Arbib (1998) argue that the brain mechanisms underlying human language abilities evolved from our non-human primate ancestors' ability to link self-generated actions and the similar actions of others. On this view, communicative gestures emerged eventually from a shared understanding that actions one makes oneself are indeed similar to those made by conspecifics. Thus, what the self knows can be enriched by an understanding of the actions and aims of others, and vice versa. From this view, the origins of language reside in behaviors not originally related to communication. That is, this common understanding of action sequences may provide the "missing link" to language. A corollary of this, not always sufficiently stressed, is that the full pattern of communication and understanding rests on a far richer set of brain functions than the core "mirror system for grasping" said to be shared by monkey and human. We report here on the early stages of a research program designed to integrate empirical cross-cultural studies of infant communicative development (Zukow, 1990; Zukow-Goldring, 1996, 1997, 2001) with a computational approach to the mirror system in monkey, human and robot (Oztop & Arbib, 2002). We stress that mirror neurons are not innate but instead correspond to a repertoire of learned actions and learned methods for recognizing those actions. Our aim is an integrated view of how perceiving and acting ground the emergence of language. Our effort is to integrate analysis of the influences of the environment and, in particular, of the ways in which caregivers attune the child to that environment ("what the head is inside of" [Mace, 1977]) with the study of the neural mechanisms that can learn from these attunements ("what is in the head"). We seek to delineate what children might "know" from birth, and the interplay of perceptual processes with action that might allow them to come to know "what everyone else already knows", including word meaning.

Keywords: mirror system, language, communication, perception/action