Author Archives: Joseph Pater

Post-past tense debate

Here is a paper by Mark Seidenberg that has some interesting thoughts about ways in which connectionism could be used to develop linguistic theory (contrast Embick and Marantz’s claim that connectionism has contributed *nothing* to our understanding of the language faculty). This elaborates in some ways on our own speculations about hidden layers and hidden structure. AndĀ here is an article in which Smolensky talks to a connectionist audience about how he views the relationship between generative grammar and connectionism.

Here is Jeff Elman’s annotated (“very selective”) bibliography on the past tense debate (and some other useful stuff – from a course he gave in Bulgaria).

Past tense debate

This TICS article by Pinker and Ullman, with replies by McClelland and colleagues, may be of interest as a place to dive into the debate that the articles we are now reading started. Also, this reply by Embick and Marantz to another article by Ullman and colleagues highlights the fact that the lexicon/rule distinction in Pinker and Ullman is not assumed in quite this fashion in generative theories of morphophonology. And following up on Alex’s comment, here’s the empirical study on childĀ overregularization I believe he was referring to, and a connectionist modeling reply.