---
title: "How Experience of the Body Shapes Language about Space"
authors:
  - "Luc Steels"
  - "Michael Spranger"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/14"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2009/0014.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2009
pages: "14-18"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# How Experience of the Body Shapes Language about Space

Luc Steels, Michael Spranger

*Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 14-18.

## Abstract

Open-ended language communication remains an enormous challenge for autonomous robots. This paper argues that the notion of a language strategy is the appropriate vehicle for addressing this challenge. A language strategy packages all the procedures that are necessary for playing a language game. We present a specific example of a language strategy for playing an Action Game in which one robot asks another robot to take on a body posture (such as stand or sit), and show how it effectively allows a population of agents to self-organise a perceptually grounded ontology and a lexicon from scratch, without any human intervention. Next, we show how a new language strategy can arise by exaptation from an existing one, concretely, how the body posture strategy can be exapted to a strategy for playing language games about the spatial position of objects (as in the bottle stands on the table).Luc L. Steels, Michael Spranger