Language Acquisition and Connectionism (Special Issues of Language and Cognitive Processes)

Plunkett

ISBN 10: 0863779840 ISBN 13: 9780863779848

Publisher: Psychology Press, 1998

Synopsis

What are the neural mechanisms underlying language acquisition and what characteristics of the linguistic input are critical to successful learning? The articles in this volume show how connectionist models of language acquisition can illuminate these questions by exposing neural network architectures to structured linguistic input. Examples from a wide variety of domains of language acquisition are covered, including the development of early speech perception, lexical and syllabic segmentation, noun and adjective acquisition, inflectional morphology, the development of spelling-sound correspondences and the acquisition of propositional knowledge. The articles show how the mental representation of linguistic structure can emerge from the interaction of a structured environment with a linguistically naïve neural network. The volume summarises and extends the growing body of work that shows that developmental psycholinguistics have hitherto underestimated the structural regularities that can be extracted from the linguistic input to the child using general learning mechanisms.

About this title

Synopsis

The articles in this volume show how the mental representation of linguistic structure can emerge from the interaction of a structured environment with a linguistically naive neural network.

Edition details

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0863779840
• ISBN 13: 9780863779848
• Binding: Library Binding
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224