Language Faculty Viewed from Motion Planning Ability

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370543
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Saitama University
• Principal Investigator: NISHINA Hiroyuki 埼玉大学, 人文社会科学研究科(系), 教授 (20125777)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 動作 / 使役関係 / 関節 / 書き換え規則 / ロボット / 言語起源

Outline of Final Research Achievements

To add some evidence to the proposed language origin in human actions, we have been exploring the possibility of a kinematic grammar of humans, and its comparison of human language grammar. Ｗe let a model robot simulate an approximate action of a human, and based on the relation of a joint’s causing another or an endpoint to move, we converted its motion program to a sequence of trees, each of which is generated by a rewriting rule system. These rules proved to be of regular type, whose complexity is known to be one step lower than that of phrase structure rules. We also found that each sequence of terminal strings generated by our kinematic grammar might well be taken as a word rather than a sentence. It has now become crucial that we must turn to the research into the mechanism in which these “words” are to be constructed, semantically as well, into a phrase structure and fit into a integrated clause compatible to a human sentence, in the whole action with a practical purpose.

Free Research Field

英語学