Speech is the principal supporting medium of language. In this book Pierre-Yves Oudeyer considers how spoken language first emerged. He presents an original and integrated view of the interactions between self-organization and natural selection, reformulates questions about the origins of speech, and puts forward what at first sight appears to be a startling proposal - that speech can be spontaneously generated by the coupling of evolutionarily simple neuralstructures connecting perception and production. He explores this hypothesis by constructing a computational system to model the effects of linking auditory and vocal motor neural nets. He shows that a population of agents which used holistic and unarticulated vocalizations at the outset are inexorably ledto a state in which their vocalizations have become discrete, combinatorial, and categorized in the same way by all group members. Furthermore, the simple syntactic rules that have emerged to regulate the combinations of sounds exhibit the fundamental properties of modern human speech systems.This original and fascinating account will interest all those interested in the evolution of speech.

Speech is the principal supporting medium of language. In this book Pierre-Yves Oudeyer considers how spoken language first emerged. He presents an original and integrated view of the interactions between self-organization and natural selection, reformulates questions about the origins of speech, and puts forward what at first sight appears to be a startling proposal - that speech can be spontaneously generated by the coupling of evolutionarily simple neural structures connecting perception and production. He explores this hypothesis by constructing a computational system to model the effects of linking auditory and vocal motor neural nets. He shows that a population of agents which used holistic and unarticulated vocalizations at the outset are inexorably led to a state in which their vocalizations have become discrete, combinatorial, and categorized in the same way by all group members. Furthermore, the simple syntactic rules that have emerged to regulate the combinations of sounds exhibit the fundamental properties of modern human speech systems.This original and fascinating account will interest all those interested in the evolution of speech.

La silhouette des montagnes, les dunes, les cristaux de glace : la nature regorge de motifs organisés. Beaucoup sont le résultat d’interactions entre les nombreux composants du système dans lequel ils prennent forme. On parle alors d’auto-organisation, présente aussi dans le vivant. Qu’en est-il de la parole ? Aux côtés de la sélection naturelle, l’auto-organisation ne joue-t-elle pas aussi un rôle essentiel pour expliquer ses structures, son émergence ? C’est l’hypothèse qu’explore cet ouvrage, qui fait se rejoindre les acquis de la linguistique, les apports de la biologie et les éclaircissements fournis par la modélisation informatique et robotique. Quand les sciences informatiques permettent d’éclairer d’un jour nouveau la nature et l’évolution du langage. Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, directeur de recherche à Inria, étudie les mécanismes du développement sensori-moteur, cognitif et social chez l’humain et chez les robots. Suivant une approche multidisciplinaire, où les sciences du numérique participent à notre compréhension du vivant et de l’homme, il s’intéresse au rôle de l’auto-organisation et de l’apprentissage au cours des interactions entre cerveau, corps et environnement physique et social. Lauréat du programme européen ERC et du prix Le Monde de la recherche universitaire, il dirige l’équipe Flowers à Inria et à l’Ensta ParisTech, et a été chercheur au Sony Computer Science Laboratory à Paris.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, HBU 2012, held in Vilamoura, Portugal, in October 2012. The 14 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on sensing human behavior; social and affective signals; human-robot interaction; imitation and learning from demonstration.

Speech is the principal supporting medium of language. In this book Pierre-Yves Oudeyer considers how spoken language first emerged. He presents an original and integrated view of the interactions between self-organization and natural selection, reformulates questions about the origins of speech, and puts forward what at first sight appears to be a startling proposal - that speech can be spontaneously generated by the coupling of evolutionarily simple neuralstructures connecting perception and production. He explores this hypothesis by constructing a computational system to model the effects of linking auditory and vocal motor neural nets. He shows that a population of agents which used holistic and unarticulated vocalizations at the outset are inexorably ledto a state in which their vocalizations have become discrete, combinatorial, and categorized in the same way by all group members. Furthermore, the simple syntactic rules that have emerged to regulate the combinations of sounds exhibit the fundamental properties of modern human speech systems.This original and fascinating account will interest all those interested in the evolution of speech.

Speech is the principal supporting medium of language. In this book Pierre-Yves Oudeyer considers how spoken language first emerged. He presents an original and integrated view of the interactions between self-organization and natural selection, reformulates questions about the origins of speech, and puts forward what at first sight appears to be a startling proposal - that speech can be spontaneously generated by the coupling of evolutionarily simple neural structures connecting perception and production. He explores this hypothesis by constructing a computational system to model the effects of linking auditory and vocal motor neural nets. He shows that a population of agents which used holistic and unarticulated vocalizations at the outset are inexorably led to a state in which their vocalizations have become discrete, combinatorial, and categorized in the same way by all group members. Furthermore, the simple syntactic rules that have emerged to regulate the combinations of sounds exhibit the fundamental properties of modern human speech systems.This original and fascinating account will interest all those interested in the evolution of speech.

La silhouette des montagnes, les dunes, les cristaux de glace : la nature regorge de motifs organisés. Beaucoup sont le résultat d’interactions entre les nombreux composants du système dans lequel ils prennent forme. On parle alors d’auto-organisation, présente aussi dans le vivant. Qu’en est-il de la parole ? Aux côtés de la sélection naturelle, l’auto-organisation ne joue-t-elle pas aussi un rôle essentiel pour expliquer ses structures, son émergence ? C’est l’hypothèse qu’explore cet ouvrage, qui fait se rejoindre les acquis de la linguistique, les apports de la biologie et les éclaircissements fournis par la modélisation informatique et robotique. Quand les sciences informatiques permettent d’éclairer d’un jour nouveau la nature et l’évolution du langage. Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, directeur de recherche à Inria, étudie les mécanismes du développement sensori-moteur, cognitif et social chez l’humain et chez les robots. Suivant une approche multidisciplinaire, où les sciences du numérique participent à notre compréhension du vivant et de l’homme, il s’intéresse au rôle de l’auto-organisation et de l’apprentissage au cours des interactions entre cerveau, corps et environnement physique et social. Lauréat du programme européen ERC et du prix Le Monde de la recherche universitaire, il dirige l’équipe Flowers à Inria et à l’Ensta ParisTech, et a été chercheur au Sony Computer Science Laboratory à Paris.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, HBU 2012, held in Vilamoura, Portugal, in October 2012. The 14 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on sensing human behavior; social and affective signals; human-robot interaction; imitation and learning from demonstration.