observations

[Stephen J Hanson]

I thought it interesting in the various exchanges that Pinker and Prince
never bothered to provide an alternative model for what seems to
clear set of phenomenon in language acquisition.  Rumelhart and
McClelland did have a model--and it kind of worked.. even if
they maybe should have considered in other experiments using other kinds 
of features (perhaps sentential syntactic or semantic).  Nonetheless, the model
has/had interesting properties, could be extended, tested and
analyzed, was well defined in terms of failures and successes, 
and apparently provides some heuristics for more experiments
and refinements and improvements on the basic model --I'm not
sure what more one could ask for.  

The complaints concerning the nature of pattern associators seems odd 
and off the mark--probably a simple misunderstanding concerning
technical issues.  And the data concerning verb past tense
acquisition are obviously important-- I doubt R & M  would disagree.
So what's the problem?  I and perhaps others watching all the words
fly (no, I have nothing to say about flying words) by wonder
what exactly is going on here--Is there another model waiting in
the wings that can compete with the R & M model?   What specific
alternative approaches really exist for modeling verb past tense
acquisition (notice this does mean learning)?  
If there are no others, perhaps P &P 
and R &M should work on improved model together. 

	Stephen J. Hanson (jose at bellcore.com)