Connections and Symbols by Steven Pinker

Author:Steven Pinker [Pinker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262660648
Goodreads: 100107
Published: 2022-07-20T19:18:47+00:00

Language and connectionism

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reflection . Thus people , when in a reflective , conscious , problem-solving mode , will seem to act more like the RM model: the overapplication of subregularities that the model is prone to can be seen in modes of language use that bear all the hallmarks of self-conscious speech , such as j ocularity (e .g. spaghettus, I got schrod at Legal Seafood, The bear shat in the woods) , explicit instruction within a community of specialists (e.g. VAX en as the plural of VAX) , pseudoerudition (rhinoceri, axia for axioms) , and hypercorrection such as the anti-broadcasted campaign documented by Mencken (similarly , we found that some of our informants offered Hurst no-kitted the Blue Jays as their first guess as to the relevant past form but withdrew it in favor of no-hit which they “conceded” was “more proper”) .

“We academics speak in complex ways, but if you were to go down to [name of nearest working-class neighborhood) you’d find that people talk very differently. ” If anything is universal about language , it is probably people’s tendency to denigrate the dialects of other ethnic or socioeconomic groups. One would hope that this prej udice is not taken seriously as a scientific argument; it has no basis in fact . The set of verbs that are irregular varies according to regional and socioeconomic dialect (see Mencken , 1936 , for extensive lists) , as does the character of the subregular patterns, but the principles organizing the system as a whole show no variation across classes or groups .

“Grammars may characterize some aspects of the ideal behavior of adults, but connectionist models are more consistent with the sloppiness found in children ‘s speech and adult’s speech errors, which are more ‘psychological’

phenomena. ” Putting aside until the next section the question of whether connectionist models really do provide a superior account of adult’s or children’s errors , it is important to recognize a crucial methodological asymmetry that this kind of obj ection fails to acknowledge . The ability to account for patterns of error is a useful criterion for evaluating competing theories each of which can account for successful performance equally well. But a theory that can only account for errorful or immature performance , with no account of why the errors are errors or how children mature into adults, is of limited value (Pinker, 1979, 1984 ; Wexler & Culicover, 1980; Gleitman & Wanner, 1982) . (Imagine a “model” of the internal combustion engine that could mimic its ability to fail to start on cold mornings-by doing nothing-but could not mimic its ability to run , under any circumstances.) Thus it is not legitimate to suggest, as Rumelhart and McClelland do , that

“people-or at least children , even in early grade-school years-are not perfect rule-applying machines either. … Thus we see little reason to believe that our model’s ‘ deficiencies’ are significantly greater than those of native speakers of comparable experience” (PDPII, p. 265-266) . Unlike the

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