Connectionist and Symbolic Models

Abstract

This chapter describes two current experience-based and rule-based models of sentence comprehension (Elman, 1992; Gibson and Thomas, 1999). The description covers the background of each theory, which takes the form of connectionism in the case of Elman (1992) and symbolic processing, in the case of Gibson and Thomas (1999). The key point made in this chapter is that current experience-based and rulebased models make the same assumptions that Hockett and Chomsky’s models made about the nature of linguistic knowledge and its relationship to the human memory system. It will be argued that the current models are therefore subject to the same limitations as the earlier models. It will also be shown that current models do not address the experimental findings reported in Chapter 3. The discussion in this chapter lays the groundwork for the discussion of models of individual differences in Chapter 5. These models are either directly based on the models described in this chapter or closely related to them.