Statistical approaches to language acquisition and the self-organizing consciousness: A reversal of perspective
Catégorie
Journal Article
Auteurs
Perruchet, P.
Année
2005
Titre
Statistical approaches to language acquisition and the self-organizing consciousness: A reversal of perspective
Journal / Livre / Conférence
Psychological Research
Résumé
Abstract Recent years have seen the upsurge of a new approach to language that moves away from the rulebased conventional framework. In this approach, mostly supported by the success of connectionist models, children learn language by exploiting the distributional properties of the input. It is argued in this paper that, in the same way as conforming to rules does not imply the existence of mental rules, conforming to statistical regularities does not imply that statistical computations are performed mentally. Sensitivity to statistical regularities can alternatively be conceived of as a by-product of the recurrent interplay between the properties of the current conscious content and the properties of the linguistic and extralinguistic environment. The validity of including the content of conscious experiences in an otherwise standard dynamical approach rooted in the notion of self-organization is discussed.
Issue
5-6
Volume
69
Pages
316-329