Behavioural, electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphology
<p>Theories of generative linguistics hold that language processing occurs by means of the manipulation of symbols by explicit rules. The past 15 years have seen the development of a radical challenge to this view, derived from a form of computational modelling called Parallel Distributed Proc...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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2000
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| _version_ | 1817931853234962432 |
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| author | Shilson, G |
| author_facet | Shilson, G |
| author_sort | Shilson, G |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>Theories of generative linguistics hold that language processing occurs by means of the manipulation of symbols by explicit rules. The past 15 years have seen the development of a radical challenge to this view, derived from a form of computational modelling called Parallel Distributed Processing or connectionism. Connectionist linguistic theory holds that language processing takes place at a subsymbolic level, and that the appearance of rule-driven behaviour is formed by the abstraction of patterns from the environment.</p> <p>The English past tense has become a critical arena of dissent between symbolic and subsymbolic theories of linguistics. There are two current dominant theories of past tense inflection: hybrid dual-route theory, championed by Pinker, posits a symbolic, explicit, default rule for the regularisation process, and an associative memory component for irregular exceptions; single-route theory maintains that regular and irregular inflectional morphology may both be accounted for within a single, subsymbolic, associative system which contains no explicit linguistic rules.</p> <p>This doctoral thesis describes a new classification of phonological similarity between verbs ('neighbourhood density'), which is used to develop mutually-exclusive and empirically-testable hypotheses from the two dominant theoretical perspectives of English past tense inflectional morphology. Empirical research is conducted in the domains of experimental psychology, electrophysiology and Connectionist modelling: four novel verb elicitation tasks are performed on adults; two ERP studies investigate brain activity for regular, irregular and novel verb inflection; and five neural network simulations are built in order to compare human data with network performance. Data are reported which have implications for single- and dual-route theories of past tense processing.</p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-06T18:33:38Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oxford-uuid:0a8005d6-54d0-4abc-8e8c-b9861840240f |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| last_indexed | 2024-12-09T03:28:37Z |
| publishDate | 2000 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:0a8005d6-54d0-4abc-8e8c-b9861840240f2024-12-01T11:20:42ZBehavioural, electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphologyThesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06uuid:0a8005d6-54d0-4abc-8e8c-b9861840240fPolonsky Theses Digitisation Project2000Shilson, G<p>Theories of generative linguistics hold that language processing occurs by means of the manipulation of symbols by explicit rules. The past 15 years have seen the development of a radical challenge to this view, derived from a form of computational modelling called Parallel Distributed Processing or connectionism. Connectionist linguistic theory holds that language processing takes place at a subsymbolic level, and that the appearance of rule-driven behaviour is formed by the abstraction of patterns from the environment.</p> <p>The English past tense has become a critical arena of dissent between symbolic and subsymbolic theories of linguistics. There are two current dominant theories of past tense inflection: hybrid dual-route theory, championed by Pinker, posits a symbolic, explicit, default rule for the regularisation process, and an associative memory component for irregular exceptions; single-route theory maintains that regular and irregular inflectional morphology may both be accounted for within a single, subsymbolic, associative system which contains no explicit linguistic rules.</p> <p>This doctoral thesis describes a new classification of phonological similarity between verbs ('neighbourhood density'), which is used to develop mutually-exclusive and empirically-testable hypotheses from the two dominant theoretical perspectives of English past tense inflectional morphology. Empirical research is conducted in the domains of experimental psychology, electrophysiology and Connectionist modelling: four novel verb elicitation tasks are performed on adults; two ERP studies investigate brain activity for regular, irregular and novel verb inflection; and five neural network simulations are built in order to compare human data with network performance. Data are reported which have implications for single- and dual-route theories of past tense processing.</p> |
| spellingShingle | Shilson, G Behavioural, electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphology |
| title | Behavioural, electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphology |
| title_full | Behavioural, electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphology |
| title_fullStr | Behavioural, electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphology |
| title_full_unstemmed | Behavioural, electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphology |
| title_short | Behavioural, electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphology |
| title_sort | behavioural electrophysiological and connectionist studies in inflectional morphology |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT shilsong behaviouralelectrophysiologicalandconnectioniststudiesininflectionalmorphology |