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48
The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
, 2000
"... Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items, thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about the mechanism behind structural priming i ..."
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Cited by 110 (4 self)
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Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items, thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about the mechanism behind structural priming include (a) short-term activation from a memory representation of a priming structure and (b) longer term adaptation within the cognitive mechanisms for creating sentences, as a form of procedural learning. Two experiments evaluated these hypotheses, focusing on the persistence of structural priming. Both experiments yielded priming that endured beyond adjacent sentences, persisting over 2 intervening sentences in Experiment 1 and over 10 in Experiment 2. Although memory may have short-term consequences for some components of this kind of priming, the persisting effects are more compatible with a learning account than a transient memory account. Speakers repeat themselves. Sometimes their repetitions are intentional, made for emphasis or other stylistic and social purposes (Giles & Powesland, 1975; Tannen, 1987), and sometimes they are accidental. They may involve almost
Becoming Syntactic
, 2006
"... Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. Th ..."
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Cited by 96 (6 self)
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Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to acquire and adapt sequencing mechanisms and (b) meaning–form mappings to derive syntactic representations. The model is able to account for most of what is known about structural priming in adult speakers, as well as key findings in preferential looking and elicited production studies of language acquisition. The model suggests how abstract knowledge and concrete experience are balanced in the development and use of syntax.
Doing without schema hierarchies: A recurrent connectionist approach to normal and impaired routine sequential action
- Psychological Review
, 2004
"... In everyday tasks, selecting actions in the proper sequence requires a continuously updated representation of temporal context. Many existing models address this problem by positing a hierarchy of processing units, mirroring the roughly hierarchical structure of naturalistic tasks themselves. Such a ..."
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Cited by 85 (13 self)
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In everyday tasks, selecting actions in the proper sequence requires a continuously updated representation of temporal context. Many existing models address this problem by positing a hierarchy of processing units, mirroring the roughly hierarchical structure of naturalistic tasks themselves. Such an approach has led to a number of difficulties, including a reliance on overly rigid sequencing mechanisms, an inability to account for context sensitivity in behavior, and a failure to address learning. We consider here an alternative framework, according to which the representation of temporal context is facilitated by recurrent connections within a network mapping from environmental inputs to actions. Applying this approach to a specific, and in many ways prototypical, everyday task (coffee-making), we examine its ability to account for several central characteristics of normal and impaired human performance. The model we consider learns to deal flexibly with a complex set of sequencing constraints, encoding contextual information at multiple time-scales within a single, distributed internal representation. Mildly degrading this context representation leads
Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: a study of the role of experience in language production
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
, 2000
"... Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [n], the [q] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created an analogue to this phenomenon by having participants recite lists of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in ..."
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Cited by 64 (2 self)
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Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [n], the [q] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created an analogue to this phenomenon by having participants recite lists of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in 4 sessions on different days. In the first 2 experiments, some consonants were always onsets, some were always codas, and some could be both. In a third experiment, the set of possible onsets and codas depended on vowel identity. In all 3 studies, the production errors that occurred respected the "phono-tactics " of the experiment The results illustrate the implicit learning of the sequential constraints present in the stimuli and show that the language production system adapts to recent experience. We know that "king " is a word of English and that, as far as we can tell, "hing " is not. However, most people would not be greatly surprised to hear that "hing " is a word that they just do not know. This is because [hlrj] is well formed. Each of its phonemes occur in English, and their ordering is consistent with English phono-tactics, the constraints that define the language's sound sequences. Just as it is apparent that "hing " is a possible word, it is even
A Connectionist Model of Sentence Comprehension and Production. Unpublished
, 2002
"... The most predominant language processing theories have, for some time, been based largely on structured knowledge and relatively simple rules. These symbolic models intentionally segregate syntactic information processing from statistical information as well as semantic, pragmatic, and discourse inf ..."
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Cited by 61 (3 self)
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The most predominant language processing theories have, for some time, been based largely on structured knowledge and relatively simple rules. These symbolic models intentionally segregate syntactic information processing from statistical information as well as semantic, pragmatic, and discourse influences, thereby minimizing the importance of these potential constraints in learning and processing language. While such models have the advantage of being relatively simple and explicit, they are inadequate to account for learning and validated ambiguity resolution phenomena. In recent years, interactive constraint-based theories of sentence processing have gained increasing support, as a growing body of empirical evidence demonstrates early influences of various factors on comprehension performance. Connectionist networks are one form of model that naturally reflect many properties of constraint-based theories, and thus provide a form in which those theories may be instantiated. Unfortunately, most of the connectionist language models implemented until now have involved severe limitations, restricting the phenomena they could address. Comprehension and production models have, by and large, been limited to simple sentences with small vocabularies (cf. St. John & McClelland, 1990). Most models that have addressed the problem of complex, multi-clausal sentence processing have been prediction networks (cf. Elman, 1991; Christiansen & Chater, 1999a). Although a useful component of a language processing system, prediction does not get at the heart of language: the interface between syntax and semantics.
Symbolically speaking: a connectionist model of sentence production
- Cognitive Science
, 2002
"... The ability to combine words into novel sentences has been used to argue that humans have symbolic language production abilities. Critiques of connectionist models of language often center on the inability of these models to generalize symbolically (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 1998). To addr ..."
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Cited by 48 (6 self)
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The ability to combine words into novel sentences has been used to argue that humans have symbolic language production abilities. Critiques of connectionist models of language often center on the inability of these models to generalize symbolically (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 1998). To address these issues, a connectionist model of sentence production was developed. The model had variables (role-concept bindings) that were inspired by spatial representations (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). In order to take advantage of these variables, a novel dual-pathway architecture with event semantics is proposed and shown to be better at symbolic generalization than several variants. This architecture has one pathway for mapping message content to words and a separate pathway that enforces sequencing constraints. Analysis of the model’s hidden units demonstrated that the model learned different types of information in each pathway, and that the model’s compositional behavior arose from the combination of these two pathways. The model’s ability to balance symbolic and statistical behavior in syntax acquisition and to model aphasic double dissociations provided independent support for the dual-pathway architecture.
Connectionist natural language processing: the state of the art
- Cognitive Science
, 1999
"... provides an opportunity for an appraisal both of specific connectionist models and of the status and utility of connectionist models of language in general. This introduction provides the background for the papers in the Special Issue. The development of connectionist models of language is traced, f ..."
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Cited by 44 (1 self)
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provides an opportunity for an appraisal both of specific connectionist models and of the status and utility of connectionist models of language in general. This introduction provides the background for the papers in the Special Issue. The development of connectionist models of language is traced, from their intellectual origins, to the state of current research. Key themes that arise throughout different areas of connectionist psycholinguistics are highlighted, and recent developments in speech processing, morphology, sentence processing, language production, and reading are described. We argue that connectionist psycholinguistics has already had a significant impact on the psychology of language, and that connectionist models are likely to have an important influence on future research. I.
Theoretical and computational analysis of skill learning, repetition priming, and procedural memory
- Psychological Review
, 2002
"... This article analyzes the relationship between skill learning and repetition priming, 2 implicit memory phenomena. A number of reports have suggested that skill learning and repetition priming can be dissociated from each other and are therefore based on different mechanisms. The authors present a t ..."
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Cited by 23 (4 self)
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This article analyzes the relationship between skill learning and repetition priming, 2 implicit memory phenomena. A number of reports have suggested that skill learning and repetition priming can be dissociated from each other and are therefore based on different mechanisms. The authors present a theoretical analysis showing that previous results cannot be regarded as evidence of a processing dissociation between skill learning and repetition priming. The authors also present a single-mechanism computational model that simulates a specific experimental task and exhibits both skill learning and repetition priming, as well as a number of apparent dissociations between these measures. These theoretical and computational analyses provide complementary evidence that skill learning and repetition priming are aspects of a single underlying mechanism that has the characteristics of procedural memory. One of the most significant developments in the study of human memory over the last two decades has been the discovery of a dissociation between two different kinds of memory systems. An early indication of this dissociation came from studies of amnesia in patients with excision or lesions of the hippocampus (Scoville & Milner, 1957). These patients were dramatically impaired in their
Connectionist sentence processing in perspective
- Cognitive Science
, 1999
"... The emphasis in the connectionist sentence-processing literature on distributed representation and emergence of grammar from such systems can easily obscure the often close relations between connectionist and symbolist systems. This paper argues that the Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) models propose ..."
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Cited by 19 (2 self)
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The emphasis in the connectionist sentence-processing literature on distributed representation and emergence of grammar from such systems can easily obscure the often close relations between connectionist and symbolist systems. This paper argues that the Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) models proposed by Jordan (1989) and Elman (1990) are more directly related to stochastic Part-of-Speech (POS) Taggers than to parsers or grammars as such, while auto-associative memory models of the kind pioneered by Longuet–Higgins, Willshaw, Pollack and others may be useful for grammar induction from a network-based conceptual structure as well as for structurebuilding. These observations suggest some interesting new directions for specifically connectionist sentence processing research, including more efficient representations for finite state machines, and acquisition devices based on a distinctively connectionist basis for grounded symbolist conceptual structure. I.
Learning to divide the labor: an account of deficits in light and heavy verb production
, 2003
"... Theories of sentence production that involve a convergence of activation from conceptual-semantic and syntactic-sequential units inspired a connectionist model that was trained to produce simple sen-tences. The model used a learning algorithm that resulted in a sharing of responsibility (or “divisio ..."
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Cited by 12 (1 self)
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Theories of sentence production that involve a convergence of activation from conceptual-semantic and syntactic-sequential units inspired a connectionist model that was trained to produce simple sen-tences. The model used a learning algorithm that resulted in a sharing of responsibility (or “division of labor”) between syntactic and semantic inputs for lexical activation according to their predictive power. Semantically rich, or “heavy”, verbs in the model came to rely on semantic cues more than on syntactic cues, whereas semantically impoverished, or “light”, verbs relied more on syntactic cues. When the syntactic and semantic inputs were lesioned, the model exhibited patterns of production characteristic of agrammatic and anomic aphasic patients, respectively. Anomic models tended to lose the ability to retrieve heavy verbs, whereas agrammatic models were more impaired in retrieving light verbs. These results obtained in both sentence production and single-word naming simulations. Moreover, simulated agrammatic lexical retrieval was more impaired overall in sentences than in single-word tasks, in agree-ment with the literature. The results provide a demonstration of the division-of-labor principle, as well as general support for the claim that connectionist learning principles can contribute to the understanding
