Byrne & Russon's target article displays all the difficulties encountered when one fails to take a methodological behaviourist approach to imitation. Their conceptual apparatus is grounded in a mixture of introspection and folk psychology. Their distinction between action-level and program-level imitation falters on goal imputation for sequential acts. In an alternative gradient descent model, behaviour can be simulated as a frustration/satisfaction gradient descent in the animal's “potentiality space,” as defined by knowledge, inventiveness, and the surrounding environment.

Syntax is better viewed as the dynamics of a morphogenetic field on a semantic universe of “content” words. This may take widely different forms, making the acquisition of any language by an aspiring speaker an entirely new experience. The existence of an underlying “universal syntax” might be illusory.

A Hebbian model for speech generation opens a number of paths. A cross-linguistic scheme of functional relationships (inspired by Aristotle) dispenses with distraction by the “parts of speech” distinctions, while bridging the gap between “content” and “structure” words. A gradient model identifies emotional and rational dynamics and shows speech generation as a process where a speaker's dissatisfaction gets minimized.

Examining the implications of a localist model for linguistic performance, I show the strengths of the P-graph, a network of elementary units of meaning where utterance results from relaxation through the operation of a dynamics of affect values. A unit of meaning is stored in a synaptic connection that brings together two words. Such a model, consistent with the anatomy and physiology of the neural tissue, eschews a number of traditional pitfalls of “semantic networks”: (1) ambiguity ceases to be an (...) issue, as similar uses of a word are automatically clustered together; (2) faster retrieval of words acquired early is explained by the larger number of their instances. In addition the P-graph takes advantage of a plausible form of information storage: the local topology of the neural tissue. (shrink)

In their quality as acoustic or visual percepts, words are linked to the emotional values of the state-of-affairs they evoke. This allows them to engender meanings capable of operating nearly entirely detached from percepts. Such a laying flat of meanings permits deliberation to take place within the window of consciousness. In such a theatre of the imagination, linguistically triggered, resides the originality of the human psyche.