~ ROA Version, 8/2002. Essentially identical to the Tech Report, with new pagination (but the same footnote and example numbering); correction of typos, oversights & outright errors; improved typography; and occasional small-scale clarificatory rewordings. Citation should include reference to this version.

Does knowledge of language consist of mentally-represented rules? Rumelhart and McClelland have described a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense in English which successfully maps many stems onto their past tense forms, both regular (walk/walked) and irregular (go/went), and which mimics some of the errors and sequences of development of children. Yet the model contains no explicit rules, only a set of neuron-style units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the stem, a set of units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the past form, and an array of connections between the two sets of units whose strengths are modified during learning. Rumelhart and McClelland conclude that linguistic rules may be merely convenient approximate fictions and that the real causal processes in language use and acquisition must be characterized as the transfer of activation levels among units and the modification of the weights of their connections. We analyze both the linguistic and the developmental assumptions of the model in detail and discover that (1) it cannot represent certain words, (2) it cannot learn many rules, (3) it can learn rules found in no human language, (4) it cannot explain morphological and phonological regularities, (5) it cannot explain the differences between irregular and regular forms, (6) it fails at its assigned task of mastering the past tense of English, (7) it gives an incorrect explanation for two developmental phenomena: stages of overregularization of irregular forms such as bringed, and the appearance of doubly-marked forms such as ated, and (8) it gives accounts of two others (infrequent overregularization of verbs ending in t/d, and the order of acquisition of different irregula...

Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13

This paper presents a method for inducing logic programs from examples that learns a new class of concepts called first-order decision lists, defined as ordered lists of clauses each ending in a cut. The method, called Foidl, is based on Foil (Quinlan, 1990) but employs intensional background knowledge and avoids the need for explicit negative examples. It is particularly useful for problems that involve rules with specific exceptions, such as learning the past-tense of English verbs, a task widely studied in the context of the symbolic/connectionist debate. Foidl is able to learn concise, accurate programs for this problem from significantly fewer examples than previous methods (both connectionist and symbolic). 1. Introduction Inductive logic programming (ILP) is a growing subtopic of machine learning that studies the induction of Prolog programs from examples in the presence of background knowledge (Muggleton, 1992; Lavrac & Dzeroski, 1994). Due to the expressiveness of first-order...

We investigated the generalization capabilities of backpropagation learning in feed-forward and recurrent feed-forward connectionist networks on the assignment of syllable boundaries to orthographic representations in Dutch (hyphenation). This is a difficult task because phonological and morphological constraints interact, leading to ambiguity in the input patterns. We compared the results to different symbolic pattern matching approaches, and to an exemplar-based generalization scheme, related to a k-nearest neighbour approach, but using a similarity metric weighed by the relative information entropy of positions in the training patterns. Our results indicate that the generalization performance of backpropagation learning for this task is not better than that of the best symbolic pattern matching approaches, and of exemplar-based generalization.

Humans routinely generalize universal relationships to unfamiliar instances. If we are told ‘‘if glork then frum,’ ’ and ‘‘glork,’ ’ we can infer ‘‘frum’’; any name that serves as the subject of a sentence can appear as the object of a sentence. These universals are pervasive in language and reasoning. One account of how they are generalized holds that humans possess mechanisms that manipulate symbols and variables; an alternative account holds that symbol-manipulation can be eliminated from scientific theories in favor of descriptions couched in terms of networks of interconnected nodes. Can these ‘‘eliminative’ ’ connectionist models offer a genuine alternative? This article shows that eliminative connectionist models cannot account for how we extend universals to arbitrary items. The argument runs as follows. First, if these models, as currently conceived, were to extend universals to arbitrary instances, they would have to generalize outside the space of training examples. Next, it is shown that the class of eliminative connectionist models that is currently popular cannot learn to extend universals outside the training space. This limitation might be avoided through the use of an architecture that implements symbol manipulation.

Learning the past tense of English verbs --- a seemingly minor aspect of language acquisition --- has generated heated debates since 1986, and has become a landmark task for testing the adequacy of cognitive modeling. Several artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been implemented, and a challenge for better symbolic models has been posed. In this paper, we present a general-purpose Symbolic Pattern Associator (SPA) based upon the decision-tree learning algorithm ID3. We conduct extensive head-to-head comparisons on the generalization ability between ANN models and the SPA under different representations. We conclude that the SPA generalizes the past tense of unseen verbs better than ANN models by a wide margin, and we offer insights as to why this should be the case. We also discuss a new default strategy for decision-tree learning algorithms. 1. Introduction Learning the past tense of English verbs, a seemingly minor aspect of language acquisition, has generated heated deb...

Developmental psychology and developmental neuropsychology have traditionally focused on the study of children. But these two fields are also supposed to be about the study of change, i.e. changes in behavior, changes in the neural structures that underlie behavior, and changes in the relationship between mind and brain across the course of development. Ironically, there has been relatively little interest in the mechanisms responsible for change in the last 15–20 years of developmental research. The reasons for this de-emphasis on change have a great deal to do with a metaphor for mind and brain that has influenced most of experimental psychology, cognitive science and neuropsychology for the last few decades, i.e. the metaphor of the serial digital computer. We will refer to this particu-

Constructivism is the Piagetian notion that learning leads the child to develop new types of representations. For example, on the Piagetian view, a child is born without knowing that objects persist in time even when they are occluded; through a process of learning, the child comes to know that objects persist in time. The trouble with this view has always been the lack of a concrete, computational account of how a learning mechanism could lead to such a change. Recently, however, in a book entitled Rethinking Innateness, Elman et al. (Elman,

The main claim of this paper is that connectionism offers cognitive science a number of excellent opportunities for turning methodological, theoretical. and meta-theoretica! schisms into powerfnl integrations--opportunities for forging constructive synergy out of the destructive interference which plagues the field. The paper begins with an analysis of the rifts in tile field and what it would take to overcome them. We argue that while connectionism ha,s often contributed to the deepexLing of these schisms, ]t is nonetheless possible to turn this trend around--possible for connectionism to play a central role in a unification of cognitive science. Essential o this process is the development of strong theoretical principles founded (in part) on connectionist computation; a main goal of this paper is to demonstrate that such principles are indeed within the reach of a connectionist-grounded theory of cognition. The enterprise rests on a willingness to entertain, analyze, and extend characterizations of cognitive problems, and hypothesized solutions, which are deliberately overly simple and general--in order to disco4'er the insights they can offer through mathematical a.na.lyses which this simplicity and generality are makes possible.