Learning resources: chapter 9

CHAPTER 09

Section 9.1 - Language And Rules: The Challenge for Information-Processing Models


Noam Chomsky and Transformational Grammar 
See Online Resources for Section 1.3.

1. Understanding a language and following rules
Natural language understanding (entry from Wikipedia)
Language acquisition (paper by Steven Pinker)
The acquisition of language by children (paper by Jenny Saffran, Ann Senghas, and John Trueswell, 2001; from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98)

2. Fodor’s argument
The language of thought hypothesis (entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Murat Aydede; see particularly section 6)

Sections 9.2 - Language Learning in Neural Networks

1. Tense learning
Children’s overregularization and its implications for cognition (paper by Gary Marcus, 2000)
Why do children say “breaked”? (paper by Gary Marcus, 1996; from Current Directions in Psychological Science, 5)
CHILDES (or Child Language Data Exchange System; downloadable transcripts of children’s language-use)
TEDtalk by Deb Roy on language acquisition

2. Language and rules
Words and rules (paper by Steven Pinker)
Rules of language (paper by Steven Pinker, 1991; from Science, 253)
Rules of language (entry from Wikipedia)

3. Neural network models of linguistic phenomena
Neural net language models (entry from Scholarpedia)
Speech recognition using neural networks (from the Center for Spoken Language Understanding)
A unified architecture for natural language processing: Deep neural networks with multitask learning (video from videolectures)
Connectionist psycholinguistics: Capturing the empirical data (paper by Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater; from Trends in Cognitive Sciences)
Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out? (paper by James McClelland and Karalyn Patterson; from Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5)
On learning the past tenses of English verbs (chapter by David Rumelhart and James McClelland; from Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, Vol. 2)
Learning the past tense of English verbs: The symbolic pattern associator vs. connectionist models (paper by Charles Ling, 1994; from the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 1)
Learning the past tense of English verbs: Connectionism fights back (paper by John Bullinaria, 1994)

Section 9.3 - Object Permanence and Physical Reasoning in Infancy
Section 9.4 - Neural Network Models of Children’s Physical Reasoning

1. Dishabituation paradigm
Preferential looking (entry from Wikipedia)
BBC baby synapse connection (video from YouTube illustrating the dishabituation or preferential looking paradigm)

2. Infants’ physical reasoning
How infants learn: Dr. Renee Baillargeon (video from YouTube)
Infants’ reasoning about hidden objects: Evidence for event-general and event-specific expectations (paper by Renee Baillargeon, 2004; from Developmental Science, 7)
Object permanence in five-month-old infants (paper by Renee Baillargeon, Elizabeth Spelke, and Stanley Wasserman, 1985; from Cognition, 20)
Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy (paper by Philip Kellman and Elizabeth Spelke, 1983; from Cognitive Psychology, 15)
Piaget—stage 1—sensorimotor, object permanence (video from YouTube)
The Developing Child, featuring Renee Baillargeon’s research and other physical reasoning studies (video)
Interview with Elizabeth Spelke (video from The New York Times)

3. Dynamical models of physical reasoning
Infant perseveration and implications for object permanence theories: A PDP model of the A-not-B task (paper by Yuko Munakata, 1998; from Developmental Science, 1)
Discussion of the A-not-B task (from the Thoughtful Animal blog)
Dynamical approaches to cognitive science (paper by Randall Beer, 2000; from Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4)
The dynamics of embodiment: A field theory of infant perseverative reaching (paper by Esther Thelen, Gregor Schoner, Christian Scheier, and Linda Smith, 2001; from Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24)
Development as a dynamic system (paper by Linda Smith and Esther Thelen, 2003; from Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7)
PBS documentary on motor development, featuring Esther Thelen (video)
Lecture on infant development by Linda Smith (video from PsyTalks)