Symbol Grounding or the Emergence of Symbols? Vocabulary Growth in Children and a Connectionist Net

Plunkett, Kim; Sinha, Chris; Möller, Martin; Strandsby, Ole

doi:10.1080/09540099208946620

Cited by 154 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…As in several other recent modelling studies (Plunkett, Sinha, Møller, & Strandsby, 1992;Schyns, 1992), we investigate the behaviour of a simple connectionist network that is trained to label a set of patterns representing perceptual inputs to the system. The goal in these studies is to show how the facts of lexical development emerge from the interaction between the learning device and the regularities inherent in the input patterns.…”

Section: A Connectionist Categorisermentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Nouns and Adjectives: A Connectionist Account

Gasser¹,

Smith²

1998

Language and Cognitive Processes

124

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Why do children learn nouns such as cup faster than dimensional adjectives such as big? Most explanations of this phenomenon rely on prior knowledge of the noun-adjective distinction or on the logical priority of nouns as the arguments of predicates. In this article we examine an alternative account, one which relies instead on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. We isolate four such properties: The relative size, the relative compactness, and the degree of overlap of the regions in representational space associated with the categories, and the presence or absence of lexical dimensions (what colour) in the linguistic context of a word. In a set of ve experiments, we trained a simple connectionist network to label input objects in particular linguistic contexts. The network learned categories resembling nouns with respect to the four properties faster than it learned categories resembling adjectives.

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Section: A Connectionist Categorisermentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Nouns and Adjectives: A Connectionist Account

Gasser¹,

Smith²

1998

Language and Cognitive Processes

124

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“…One example of such a kind of simulation is the work of Plunkett, Sinha, Møller and Strandsby (1992). They designed a network that had to associate simple pictures with labels.…”

Section: Models Of the Acquisition Of Grounded Symbolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symbol Grounding and the Symbolic Theft Hypothesis

Cangelosi

Greco

Harnad

2002

Simulating the Evolution of Language

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Scholars studying the origins and evolution of language are also interested in the general issue of the evolution of cognition. Language is not an isolated capability of the individual, but has intrinsic relationships with many other behavioral, cognitive, and social abilities. By understanding the mechanisms underlying the evolution of linguistic abilities, it is possible to understand the evolution of cognitive abilities. Cognitivism, one of the current approaches in psychology and cognitive science, proposes that symbol systems capture mental phenomena, and attributes cognitive validity to them. Therefore, in the same way that language is considered the prototype of cognitive abilities, a symbol system has become the prototype for studying language and cognitive systems. Symbol systems are advantageous as they are easily studied through computer simulation (a computer program is a symbol system itself), and this is why language is often studied using computational models.A symbol system is made up by a set of arbitrary "physical tokens" (i.e., symbols) that can be manipulated on the basis of explicit rules (i.e., syntax). Some of the main properties of such a symbol system are: (a) compositeness, that is symbols and rules can be recursively composed; and (b) semantic interpretability, specifying that the entire system and its parts can be systematically assigned a meaning (Pylyshyn, 1984;Harnad, 1990). Some significant issues arise when studying such symbol systems as a direct metaphor and model of language. These will also have direct implications for the study of the origins and evolution of language. The first issue is to establish exactly what a symbol is, by giving a clear

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“…Other approaches have argued that qualitative shifts in processing are not needed to explain linguistic development in the second year. For example, Plunkett, Sinha, Møller, and Strandsby (1992) argued that non-linearities in vocabulary growth could be explained in terms of the strengthening of word-object associations with age. This view implies that the age-related differences observed by Mills et al (1997) may have resulted from the different amounts of experience with the words used in the study across the two age groups.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, 20-month-olds will have had more opportunities to hear and use the 'known' words than 13-month-olds. According to Plunkett et al (1992), increased experience with a word leads directly to a change in the way that word is processed and thus to age-related changes in patterns of brain activity. Such changes need not, however, reflect changes in underlying processing mechanism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Watching the infant brain learn words: effects of vocabulary size and experience

Mills

Plunkett

Prat

et al. 2005

Cognitive Development

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123

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Previous investigations comparing auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to words whose meanings infants did or did not comprehend, found bilateral differences in brain activity to known versus unknown words in 13-month-old infants, in contrast with unilateral, left hemisphere, differences in activity in 20-month-old infants. We explore two alternative explanations for these findings. Changes in hemispheric specialization may result from a qualitative shift in the way infants process known words between 13 and 20 months. Alternatively, hemispheric specialization may arise from increased familiarity with the individual words tested. We contrasted these two explanations by measuring ERPs from 20-month-old infants with high and low production scores, for novel words they had just learned. A bilateral distribution of ERP differences was observed in both groups of infants, though the difference was larger in the left hemisphere for the high producers. These findings suggest that word familiarity is an important factor in determining the distribution of brain regions involved in word learning. An emerging left hemispheric specialization may reflect increased efficiency in the manner in which infants process familiar and novel words.

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Symbol Grounding or the Emergence of Symbols? Vocabulary Growth in Children and a Connectionist Net

Cited by 154 publications

References 24 publications

Learning Nouns and Adjectives: A Connectionist Account

Learning Nouns and Adjectives: A Connectionist Account

Symbol Grounding and the Symbolic Theft Hypothesis

Watching the infant brain learn words: effects of vocabulary size and experience

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