Through constant exposure to adult input, in dialogue, children’s language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions that contain multiple cross-modal elements subtly used together for coherent communicative functions. In this chapter, we retrace children’s pathways into multimodal language acquisition in a scaffolding interactional environment. We begin with the first multimodal bu...

This papers shows how to tackle the problem of ever larger languages and of the combination of multiple languages. The central idea is the foundation of the language definition by a metamodel driven approach that is supported by language engineering tools. Thus the development and the further evolution of languages will be transformed from the traditional paper-and-pen style into an engineering...

Linguistic and conceptual development converge crucially in the process of early word learning. Acquiring a new word requires the child to identify a conceptual unit, identify a linguistic unit, and establish a mapping between them. On the conceptual side, the child has to not only identify the relevant part of the scene being labeled, but also isolate a concept at the correct level of abstract...

Background Deaf education has undergone significant changes over the past one hundred years: none more major than the swing away from using sign languages at the end of the 19th century to the reverse of that trend today. Sign languages are increasingly being used in bilingual deaf education programmes in Europe and the USA (Kyle 1987, Strong 1988, Quigley & Paul 1987, Johnson, Liddell and Erti...

Language-driven software development consists in applying computer language design and implementation techniques to build conventional software. The keynote reviews two different languagedriven development approaches: domain-specific languages (DLSs), and language-oriented architectures (LOAs). The DSL approach focuses on the provision of languages specialized in different application aspects, ...

Cooperating robots can benefit from communication. Our robots create their own adaptable synthetic robot languages (ASRLs). We have shown that robots can develop “basic”, context dependent, and compositional ASRLs using reinforcement learning techniques. (See (Yanco 1994) for a complete description of this work.) We have demonstrated that the robots are able to develop ASRLs using two different...