HUMAN LANGUAGE AND INTELLIGENCE are thought to have evolved together. Several degrees of intelligence and other cognitive abilities are found in animals and AI artefacts, but fully fledged intelligence has only been found when some language proficiency takes place – and vice versa. Despite the relevance of language, hitherto we have tried to consider assessment tools that do not require language, by a combination of the abstract character of many non-verbal psychometric tests and the interfaces found in animal cognition and several areas of artificial intelligence. In this chapter we finally turn the spotlight on communication abilities. In psychometrics, many tests incorporate tasks for verbal abilities, and verbal factors have been found in many test batteries. But, what happens when we apply them to AI systems?Will the tests be falsified for computers? If so, can we overhaul the evaluation of communication abilities in a more principled way, using situated tests, where the transmission of orders, concepts, facts and policies is required, or perhaps through the use of artificial languages, as has been done with primates? Given the challenge, we will mostly focus on understanding how language comprehension, acquisition and construction may affect evaluation.

THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION

From the perspective of the social contexts seen in the previous chapter, communication is nothing but a sequence of actions involving two or more agents. An agent uses ‘communicative’ actions to influence other agents’ behaviour. If successful, the effect can develop into a conspecific being set alert, a predator being scared, a child being educated, a partner being decoyed or a citizen being convinced to change her vote. If the receiver is also able to respond, then communication becomes a social game, which can be co-operative or competitive – or simply exploratory. Under this view, most animals and computers are capable of some sort of communication. Indeed, in biology, animal signals are understood in this way, where communication goes much beyond the transmission of information towards the realm of manipulation (Dawkins and Krebs, 1978; Smith and Harper, 2003).