ABSTRACT

In the embodied, situated, enacted and distributed approaches to cognition, the coordinative role of language comes to the fore. Language, with its symbolic properties, arises from a multimodal stream of interactive events and gradually gains power to constrain them in a functional and adaptive way. In this article, we attempt to integrate three approaches to information in cognitive systems to provide a theoretical background to the process of development of language as such a coordinator. Ecological psychology provides an explanation for how any behaviors or events become informative through the process of “tuning” to affordances that control individual and collective behavior. The dynamical approach helps to operationalize this control as a functional reduction of degrees of freedom of individual and collective systems. Cognitive semiotics provides a typology of constraints showing their interrelations: it proposes conditions under which informational controls that function as indices and icons may become symbolic, providing a qualitatively different form of constraint, which can be partially ungrounded from the ongoing stream of multimodal events. The article illustrates the proposed processes with examples from actual parent-infant interaction and points to ways of verifying them in a more quantitative way.

摘要

在体现，定位，颁布和分散的认知方法中，语言的协调作用日益突出。语言具有象征性，它源于交互事件的多模式流，并逐渐获得以功能性和自适应性方式约束它们的能力。在本文中，我们尝试将三种信息处理方法集成到认知系统中，以为作为语言协调员的语言发展过程提供理论背景。生态心理学提供了一种解释，说明任何行为或事件如何通过“调整”到控制个人和集体行为的能力的过程中变得具有信息性。动态方法有助于在功能上降低单个和集体系统的自由度，从而实现这种控制。认知符号学提供了一种约束条件的类型学，显示了它们之间的相互关系：它提出了条件，在这些条件下，充当索引和图标的信息控件可能会变成符号，从而提供质的不同形式的约束条件，而这种约束条件可以部分地从正在进行的多模式事件流中摆脱出来。本文以实际的父母-婴儿互动为例，说明了所提出的过程，并指出了以更定量的方式验证它们的方法。