%A Robert Clowes %A Anthony F. Morse %T Scaffolding Cognition with Words %X We describe a set of experiments investigating the role of natural language symbols in scaffolding situated action. Agents are evolved to respond appropriately to commands in order to perform simple tasks. We explore three different conditions, which show a significant advantage to the re-use of a public symbol system, through self-cueing leading to qualitative changes in performance. This is modelled by looping spoken output via environment back to heard input. We argue this work can be linked to, and sheds new light on, the account of self-directed speech advanced by the developmental psychologist Vygotsky in his model of the development of higher cognitive function. %K self-directed language, cognitive bootstrapping, simple recurrent neural network, genetic algorithm %P 101-105 %E Luc Berthouze %E Fr?d?ric Kaplan %E Hideki Kozima %E Hiroyuki Yano %E J?rgen Konczak %E Giorgio Metta %E Jacqueline Nadel %E Giulio Sandini %E Georgi Stojanov %E Christian Balkenius %V 123 %D 2005 %I Lund University Cognitive Studies %L cogprints4980