Connectionism: Explanation or Implementation?

Abstract

EXCHANGE Connectionism: Explanation or Implementation? Cheryl Fantuzzi University of California, Los Angeles Although purely empiricist, or environment-based, theories of language acquisition suffered some serious setbacks with the rise of generative grammar, they have very recently come into vogue again with a new brand of cognitive modeling known as connectionism. Connectionism represents the strongest form of empiricism: radical connectionists typically argue that all learning is based on the processing of input, and that there is no need to posit any a priori internal structure to the processing system at all. What linguists describe as rule-governed behavior, radical connectionists say is only a description of the emergent behavior of the processor. Learning is simply a matter of strengthening and weakening neural connections in response to the statistical frequency of patterns in the input, and the abstract symbols and rules that are so crucial to current linguistic theory have no place at all in a connectionist system. There have been varied responses to these strong claims. Some have been wildly enthusiastic about the new approach (e.g., Sampson, 1987) while others have severely Mehler, criticized many of its claims (e.g., the papers in Pinker extensive middle ground between the two 1989). There is also an extremes however. While pure Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models seem to work best with problems involving motor control or the earliest stages of visual processing, connectionists working with more complex cognitive processes such as language or problem solving have often incorporated symbols into their connectionist architectures (e.g., the papers in Hinton, 1991). There has recendy been some interest in the applicability of connectionist models to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory and research (Schmidt, 1988; Gasser, 1990; Sokolik, 1990). In the last issue of ML, Yas Shirai (1992) added his voice Issues in Applied Linguistics © Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol.3 No. 2 1992 319-340