My program of research brings together principles from the strong tradition of cognitive linguistics, the emerging framework of embodied cognition, and pioneering work in humanoid robotics to better understand how we comprehend described events. Our team employs a methodical approach in which (1) the behavior in question is first characterized, (2) the mechanisms that implement that behavior are identified, and (3) this knowledge is used to create an artificial system (derived from human neurophysiology) that can produce the behavior. Following this approach, we first investigate whether assumptions from cognitive linguistics play a role in the representations of described events. We conduct experiments to further articulate the nature and role of these representations within the novel framework of embodied language comprehension, with particular focus on the interaction between the language system and the perceptual system. Finally, we implement these embodied language comprehension findings from human behavioral and neuroscience studies into a model of event comprehension for a humanoid robot.
