This isn't a very new concept -- I learned about this in the 90s. Even then the language researchers knew that interaction with the environment was crucial for

This isn't a very new concept -- I learned about this in the 90s. Even then the language researchers knew that interaction with the environment was crucial for learning in humans. There were some natural experiments where kids were born without limbs for example and had trouble with early language acquisition because they couldn't experience the environment the same way as most others. And the AI folks argued even then that the only way to create a language model that truly "understands" would be to put it in a robot that can experience the world in the same way as a human.