The Ontogenesis of Action Syntax

Abstract

Language and action share similar organizational principles. Both are thought to be hierarchical and recursive in nature. Here we address the relationship between language and action from developmental and neurophysiological perspectives. We discuss three major aspects: The extent of the analogy between language and action; the necessity to extend research on the yet largely neglected aspect of action syntax; the positive contribution of a developmental approach to this topic. We elaborate on the claim that adding an ontogenetic approach will help to obtain a comprehensive picture about both the interplay between language and action and its development, and to answer the question whether the underlying mechanisms of detecting syntactic violations of action sequences are similar to or different from the processing of language syntactic violations.

Neural dynamics of grip and goal integration during the processing of others’ actions with objects: An ERP study

“…In both our study and Bach et al 31 study, action stimuli varied along several combinations of grips and goals that needed to be integrated to perform the recognition task and N400 modulations were observed. Therefore, these findings corroborate the interpretation of the N400 as a marker of semantic construction and integration across different domains such as action and language processing 30,48 .…”

“…Action recognition tends to be more and more considered as a heterogeneous set of various dynamic mechanisms rather than a unitary process 56 and would rely on both specific and domain-general abilities 36,57 . In parallel, EEG is increasingly recommended to investigate the commonalities and differences between action and language processing 30,48 . Therefore, we believe that the contribution of EEG to the understanding of action recognition will grow in the future.…”

Hierarchical structure in language and action: A formal comparison

“…Similar to the hierarchical structure underlying sentences, action sequences are thought to be governed by hierarchically organized action plans (Botvinick, 2008;Fitch, 2011;Jeon, 2014;Koechlin & Jubault, 2006;Lashley, 1951;Rosenbaum, Cohen, Jax, Weiss, & van der Wel, 2007;Summers & Anson, 2009) 9 . This structural analogy between linguistic syntax and actions has recently received considerable attention from several corners of cognitive science (Arbib, 2006a;Boeckx & Fujita, 2014;Fitch, 2011;Jackendoff, 2009Jackendoff, , 2011Pulvermüller, 2014;Moro, 2014aMoro, , 2014b, in which the hierarchical structure of actions is sometimes called action syntax (Fitch & Martins, 2014;Maffongelli, D'Ausilio, Fadiga, & Daum, 2019;Pulvermüller, 2014).…”

“…These action dependencies, instead, are temporal rather than hierarchical: you cannot close a door before having opened it (Dominey, Hoen, Blanc, & Lelekov-Boissard, 2003;Uddén & Bahlmann, 2012;Zaccarella et al, 2021). Indeed, actions and events are known to be understood in terms of temporal structure (Zacks & Tversky, 2001;McRae, Brown, & Elman, 2019;Zacks, 2020), and oddly ordered complex actions, which are thought of as ungrammatical actions (e.g., Maffongelli et al, 2019), reflect the violation of "temporal rules" rather than phrase-structure rules (Zaccarella et al, 2021).…”

“…In contrast, the validity of action sequences seems related to their coherence, in terms of both logical consistency and environmental appropriateness. It has been suggested that a complex action is 'ungrammatical' if its sub-parts are ordered in such a way that the action's overall goal cannot be achieved (Jackendoff, 2007;Maffongelli et al, 2019). The 'grammaticality' of an action is thus intimately tied to the fulfillment of its goal, showing that the notion 'ungrammatical' is very different for action sequences and sentences (Zaccarella et al, 2021).…”