A model of grounded language acquisition: Sensorimotor features improve lexical and grammatical learning

It is generally accepted that children have sensorimotor mental representations for concepts even before they learn the words for those concepts. We argue that these prelinguistic and embodied concepts direct and ground word learning, such that early concepts provide scaffolding by which later word learning, and even grammar learning, is enabled and facilitated. We gathered numerical ratings of the sensorimotor features of many early words (352 …