No subject
Kim Plunkett
psykimp at aau.dk
Fri Feb 22 05:47:37 EST 1991
The following technical report is now available. For a copy,
email "psyklone at aau.dk" and include your ordinary mail address.
Kim Plunkett
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Connectionism and Developmental Theory
Kim Plunkett and Chris Sinha
University of Aarhus, Denmark
Abstract
The main goal of this paper is to argue for an ``epigenetic
developmental interpretation'' of connectionist modelling of
human cognitive processes, and to propose that parallel dis-
tributed processing (PDP) models provide a superior account
of developmental phenomena than that offered by cognitivist
(symbolic) computational theories. After comparing some of
the general characteristics of epigeneticist and cognitivist
theories, we provide a brief overview of the operating prin-
ciples underlying artificial neural networks (ANNs) and
their associated learning procedures. Four applications of
different PDP architectures to developmental phenomena are
described. First, we assess the current status of the debate
between symbolic and connectionist accounts of the process
of English past tense formation. Second, we introduce a
connectionist model of concept formation and vocabulary
growth and show how it provides an account of aspects of
semantic development in early childhood. Next, we take up
the problem of compositionality and structure dependency in
connectionist nets, and demonstrate that PDP models can be
architecturally designed to capture the structural princi-
ples characteristic of human cognition. Finally, we review a
connectionist model of cognitive development which yields
stage-like behavioural properties even though structural and
input assumptions remain constant throughout training. It is
shown how the organisational characteristics of the model
provide a simple but precise account of the equilibration of
the processes of accommodation and assimilation. The
authors conclude that a coherent epigenetic-developmental
interpretation of PDP modelling requires the rejection of
so-called hybrid-architecture theories of human cognition.
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