Part of
Becoming Eloquent: Advances in the emergence of language, human cognition, and modern culturesEdited by Francesco d'Errico and Jean-Marie Hombert
[Not in series 152] 2009
► pp. 267–286
A growing scala of computational and robotic experiments are trying to pin down the cognitive and social prerequisites that may have given rise to human language. From humble beginnings showing how a lexicon may self-organize in a population of artificial agents, these research efforts are now exploring how grammatical languages about complex scenes may emerge. This paper introduces this field of inquiry and then explores whether a dialog with archeologists might be useful.