Grounding Language in Action

The topic of this Special Issue is that action and lan guage are interwoven. Driven by traditional approaches that prevail in our education, we might be surprised about the connection between language and action, since we are inclined to view language as a symbolic system as it connects entities in the world with the corresponding conceptions that a perceiver has in mind. Action, on the other hand, was considered to be an event in the world that has to be perceived first. Only then, could it also be labeled by a perceiver, so a particular conception of it could be represented in the mind. The research from perspective on how cognition develops, however, contributed to findings suggesting that what we know about action, language and interaction emerge in parallel and have an impact on each other. This parallel development seems to provide a ground for further mental growth. For a system to develop, it requires different processes to interact not only with each other, but also with the physical world. This coupling is also a valuable source of intelligence as it provides knowledge that shapes the system's performance without actually being part of the system.