Cognitive Science An Introduction to the Science of the Mind

This chapter discusses different theoretical perspectives on modeling language understanding and learning. The first section discusses the role of rules in learning and understanding a language. In the second section, we introduce Fodor's argument that natural language learning requires an innate representational system which he calls the language of thought. The third section looks at a very different approach involving connectionist neural networks. Connectionists argue that the trajectory of language learning can be simulated in networks that lack explicitly encoded linguistic rules – e.g. in neural networks that can be trained to learn the tenses of English words. The last section looks at the Bayesian approach to language learning.