Connectionist Perspective Research Articles

On theory and modelling

Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1988). Topography of cognition: Parallel distributed networks in primate association cortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 11, 137–156. Kojima, S., & and, G.-R. P. S. (1982). Delay-related activity of prefrontal neurons in rhesus monkeys performing delayed response. Brain Research, 248, 43–49. Montague, P. R., Dayan, P., & Sejnowski, T. J. (1996). A framework for mesencephalic dopamine systems based on predictive Hebbian learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 1936–1947. Munakata. (1997). Infant perseveration and implications for object permanence theories: A PDP model of the A-not-B task. Developmental Science, this issue. Niki, H., & Watanabe, M. (1976). Prefrontal unit activity and delayed response: relation to cue location versus direction of response. Brain Research, 105, 79–88. Quartz, S. R., & Sejnowski, T. J. (in press). The neural basis of cognitive development: A constructivist manifesto. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 196€Commentaries

Book reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Human Evolution, Language and Mind: A Psychological and Archaeological Inquiry. By W. Noble & I. Davidson.Cognitive Psychology By Ronald T. Kellogg.School Recess and Playground Behaviour: Educational and Developmental Roles By A. D. Pellegrini.Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development By J. L. Elman, E. A. Bates, M. H. Johnson, A. Karmiloff‐Smith, D. Parisi & K. Plunkett.Preventing Childhood Disorders, Substance Abuse, and Delinquency. By R. De V. Peters, R. J. McMahon.Learning the Rules: The Anatomy of Children's Relationships By Brian J. Bigelow, Geoffrey Tesson, John H. LewkoAgency. Its Role in Mental Development. By James Russell.Deconstructing developmental psychology By Erica BurmanIntroduction to Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology 2nd ed By Hugh Coolican

Book reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Superportraits: Caricatures and Recognition in the series of Essays in Cognitive Psychology. By Gillian Rhodes.Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children's Testimony. By Stephen J. Ceci & Maggie Bruck.Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. By J. L. Elman, E. A. Bates, M. H. Johnson, A. Karmiloff‐Smith, D. Parisi & K. Plunkett.

Can connectionism save constructivism?

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, J.L., Bates, E., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., Plunkett, K., 1996. Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) have claimed that connectionist models might provide an account of the development of new kinds of representations that would not depend on the existence of innate representations. I show that the models described in Rethinking Innateness depend on innately assumed representations and that they do not offer a genuine alternative to nativism. Moreover, I present simulation results which show that these models are incapable of deriving genuine abstract representations that are not presupposed. I then give a formal account of why the models fail to generalize in the ways that humans do. Thus, connectionism, at least in its current form, does not provide any support for constructivism. I conclude by sketching a possible alternative.

PROCEEDINGS OF THE GRONINGEN ASSEMBLY ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.Charlotte Koster and Frank Wijnen (Eds.). Groningen, The Netherlands: Centre for Language and Cognition Groningen, 1996. Pp. 389.

This volume contains 34 papers presented at the Groningen Assembly on Language Acquisition in September 1995. According to the editors, the conference was designed to promote “a lively discussion about the merits and constraints of different approaches to language acquisition.” Not surprisingly, in a conference that explicitly mentions it is continuing in the tradition of GALA 1993, Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, 23 of the papers in one way or the other deal with the innate properties of language and their status in language acquisition, whereas 7 papers have a connectionist perspective. Only 2 of the connectionist papers provide data from language learners. Two papers describe aspects of first language acquisition without an obvious theoretical allegiance. Only 1 paper considers how children make use of negative input provided in an experimental setting for learning about irregular verb forms. There is not a single paper on how interaction with caregivers influences language acquisition or how language is socially constructed.

The effect of word-final phonemes on spoken word recognition

Three experiments tested subjects’ ability to recognize spoken words based on word-final phonological information. Experiment 1 replicated the finding [A. Salasoo and D. B. Pisoni, J. Memory Lang. 24, 210–231 (1985)] that when presented with phonological information incrementally beginning from word-offset (backward gating), subjects correctly identified spoken words in the absence of word-initial phonemes. Additionally, experiment 1 demonstrated that acoustic neighborhood size is a significant predictor of recognition probability for both forward and backward gated words. In experiment 2, word-initial and word-final acoustic word fragments were used as primes in a crossmodal identity priming task with a naming response. Both word-initial and word-final primes significantly facilitated subsequent naming reaction times. Experiment 3 replicated experiment 2 using an associative priming paradigm. The results are interpreted from a connectionist perspective. [Work supported by NICHD.]