Mathematical Tractability of Neural Nets

[Elizabeth Bates]

But in fact, you stil have the facts wrong: In richly-inflected
languages, Wernicke's aphasics look just as bad as Broca's in the
domain of grammar.  The supposed grammar/semantics division is a
peculiarity of English.  When we first got these findings, I went
back to Arnold Pick, the long-ago originator of the term "agrammatism."
Pick worked with Czech & German patients -- and guess what?  He
in fact postulated two forms of agrammatism: non-fluent (anterior)
and fluent (posterior). Of these two, he believed that the fluent
was the most interesting of the two, revealing more about the point
in processing (dynamically/temporally considered) at which assignment
of grammatical forms is made.  Yes, you are right, the brain is more
than a bowl of oatmeal: there are lines running from the eyes to the
occiptal lobes, there is such a thing as a motor strip, and so on.
And of course these things need to be taken into account by
connectionist models.  But even if you COULD pinpoint broca's area
with precision for any given individual, that would not nail down
for you ANY particularly linguistic domain.  Re right hemisphere
language: Gazzaniga claims to have new evidence that the right
hemisphere (in split brain folks) can make grammaticality judgments!!
where does that leave you?  Broca's and Wernicke's BOTH have
semantic problems (e.g. in priming) and BOTH have grammatical
problems (as noted above).  In short -- you have bought a used
car. -liz bates