This article discusses the importance of social interaction for the development of the representations for symbolic communication. We suggest that there is no need to distinguish between different representational systems emerging at different stages of development. Instead, we propose that representations are rich right from the beginning of a child’s life, and that they are driven mainly by acting and interacting in the physical and social world. The more variety in a child’s interactional experience, the more enriched and abstracted the (...) representations become. We review literature providing evidence for the ways in which infants’ development toward symbolic communication benefits from repeated social action and consider some implications for computational approaches. (shrink)

Language comprehension of action verbs recruits embodied representations in the brain that are assumed to invoke a mental simulation. This extends to abstract concepts, as well. We, therefore, argue that mental simulation works across levels of abstractness and involves higher-level schematic structures that subsume a generic structure of actions and events.