A methodical study of the primitive cultures of the hunting-gathering peoples which focuses on their social structures and economic relations.

Time underlies many interesting human behaviors. Thus, the question of how to represent time in connectionist models is very important. One approach is to represent time implicitly by its effects on processing rather than explicitly (as in a spatial representation). The current report develops a proposal along these lines first described by Jordan (1986) which involves the use of recurrent links in order to provide networks with a dynamic memory. In this approach, hidden unit patterns are fed back to themselves: (...) the internal representations which develop thus reflect task demands in the context of prior internal states. A set of simulations is reported which range from relatively simple problems (temporal version of XOR) to discovering syntactic/semantic features for words. The networks are able to learn interesting internal representations which incorporate task demands with memory demands: indeed, in this approach the notion of memory is inextricably bound up with task processing. These representations reveal a rich structure, which allows them to be highly context‐dependent, while also expressing generalizations across classes of items. These representations suggest a method for representing lexical categories and the type/token distinction. (shrink)

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation (...) of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon. (shrink)

Chapter on The Australian class system previously published as Sociocentre relationship terms and the Australian class system qv. for annotation.

Periodically in science there arrive on the scene what appear to be dramatically new theoretical frameworks (what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has called paradigm shifts). Characteristic of such changes in perspective is the recasting of old problems in new terms. By altering the conceptual vocabulary we use to think about problems, we may discover solutions which were obscured by prior ways of thinking about things. Connectionism, artificial life, and dynamical systems are all approaches to cognition which are relatively (...) new and have been claimed to represent such paradigm shifts. Just how deep the shifts are remains an open question, but each of these approaches certainly seems to offer novel ways of dealing with basic questions in cognitive science. (shrink)

An essential aspect of knowing language is knowing the words of that language. This knowledge is usually thought to reside in the mental lexicon, a kind of dictionary that contains information regarding a word’s meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. In this article, a very different view is presented. In this view, words are understood as stimuli that operate directly on mental states. The phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of a word are revealed by the effects it has on (...) those states. (shrink)

These essays collectively present new perspectives on the history of modern science in China since 1900. Fa‐ti Fan describes how science under the Republic of China after 1911 exhibited a complex local and international character that straddled both imperialism and colonialism. Danian Hu focuses on the fate of relativity in the physics community in China after 1917. Zuoyue Wang hopes that a less nationalist political atmosphere in China will stimulate more transnational studies of modern science, which will in turn reveal (...) the underlying commonalities in different national contexts. Sigrid Schmalzer compares the socialist and the capitalist contexts for science in China and reopens the sensitive question of the “mass line” during the Cultural Revolution. Grace Shen describes the tensions early Chinese scientists felt when choosing between foreign models for modern geology and their own professional identities in China. Taken together, these accounts present us with a comparative history of modern science in China that is both globally and locally informed. (shrink)

Life Goes On (1989–1993) was the first television series in U.S. history not only to introduce a recurring teenaged HIV-positive character but also to feature an actor with Down syndrome in a leading role. Drawing new connections among disability studies, queer theory, and bioethics, I argue that Life responded to American disability rights activism and the AIDS epidemic of the early 1990s by depicting sex education as disability activism. By portraying fulfilling sexual relationships for its disabled protagonists, Life challenged heteronormative (...) and ableist underpinnings of marriage, sexuality, reproduction, and sex education and imagined transgressive queer/disabled alliances that often surpassed those of activists of its cultural moment. By representing homophobia, AIDS-phobia, and ableism as intertwined oppressions, the series conjured an expansive vision of sexual justice and pleasure, one that included and united teenagers, intellectually disabled people, and seropositive people—populations whose sexualities have generally been regarded as pathological or nonexistent. (shrink)

McRae, Brown and Elman argue against the view that events are structured as frequently‐occurring sequences of world stimuli. They underline the importance of temporal structure defining event types and advance a more complex temporal structure, which allows for some variance in the component elements.

Anticipation plays a role in language comprehension. In this article, we explore the extent to which verb sense influences expectations about upcoming structure. We focus on change of state verbs like shatter, which have different senses that are expressed in either transitive or intransitive structures, depending on the sense that is used. In two experiments we influence the interpretation of verb sense by manipulating the thematic fit of the grammatical subject as cause or affected entity for the verb, and test (...) whether readers’ expectations for a transitive or intransitive structure change as a result. This sense‐biasing context influenced reading times in the postverbal regions. Reading times for transitive sentences were faster following good‐cause than good‐theme subjects, but the opposite pattern was found for intransitive sentences. We conclude that readers use sense‐contingent subcategorization preferences during on‐line comprehension. (shrink)

The nature–nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. (...) Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and the environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (outcome X is so peculiar that it must be innate), (2) species specificity (we are the only species who do X, so X must lie in the human genome), (3) localization (outcome X is mediated by a particular part of the brain, so X must be innate), and (4) learnability (we cannot figure out how X could be learned, so X must be innate). We believe that an explicit, plausible theory of interaction is now around the corner, and that many of the classic maneuvers to defend or attack innateness will soon disappear. In the interim, some serious errors can be avoided if we keep these confounded issues apart. That is the major goal of this chapter: not to attack innateness but to clarify what claims about innateness are (and are not) about. (shrink)

Yung Sik Kim's new book is a welcome addition to the large number of studies of the thought of Chu Hsi, arguably the most important literati thinker in China since the Southern Song dynasty . Chu's ideas became orthodox empire‐wide during the early Ming dynasty , and during the Ming and Qing dynasties millions of candidates for the imperial civil service examinations mastered the “Learning of the Way” associated with Chu and his followers. With the exception of the pioneering study (...) by Yamada Keiji in 1978, nearly all previous accounts of Chu's ideas written by students of Chinese philosophy have emphasized the metaphysical, moral, and epistemological concerns in Chu's writings. Those more concerned with imperial dogma and state power in China since 1400 have tended to paint Chu Hsi's “Learning of the Way” as a monolithic, authoritarian ideology that legitimated the Ming and Qing dynasty rulers politically, socially, and culturally among gentry elites.Kim acknowledges that the core of Chu Hsi's grand intellectual synthesis was focused on moral and social philosophy, but in this book Kim provides compelling information that Chu was also concerned with natural knowledge about the three levels of reality: heaven and earth, the myriad things in the world, and the human realm. Humans thus formed a triad with heaven and earth as the most numinous living thing because they were endowed with the psycho‐physical stuff of ch'i that was most clear and complete. Recognizing no boundary between the physical and the spiritual, Chu Hsi equated human nature with the universe. The basic concepts that informed Chu's natural world were yin‐yang, the five evolutive phases, and the dualism of li and ch'i .Chu Hsi advocated a scholarly agenda that would explain why things and events were as they were. Through the “investigation of things,” the heavenly principle that inscribed the ch'i of each object and event could be discovered. Normally historians of Chinese philosophy stress the place of universal heavenly li in Chu's thought, but Kim makes a concerted effort not to overlook the important place of ch'i as the aggregated collection of stuff in the universe, some dense and falling like the earth, some airy and rising like heaven. Indeed, as important as li was for Chu Hsi's moral philosophy, ch'i was the most important concept he employed to explain natural phenomena, material changes, and earthly events. With no discontinuity between matter and life, or between materiality and mind, Chu's philosophy made no allowance for the Western distinctions between the material and spiritual spheres or between the physical and mental realms.It was precisely such views that troubled the Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci who came to China in the late sixteenth century. Ricci and his European cohort would be condemned in the early eighteenth century by French Jansenists and Spanish Franciscans for their overly accommodational compromises with traditional Chinese religious practices such as ancestor worship, which Ricci interpreted as a civil rite. Nonetheless, when Ricci studied Chu Hsi's moral philosophy and natural thought, he was appalled at its materialism and atheism, which he considered the fault of Buddhism and its impact on Song literati such as Chu Hsi.The “noninertness” of ch'i carried over from the dynamic materiality of all things, including the human mind, to the formless and unfathomable spirits and ghosts that existed in a border area outside the natural realm between heaven and human beings. The dispersion of ch'i upon death could take many forms but, according to Chu Hsi, in the end all such ch'i disaggregated, leaving no ongoing or abiding spiritual form for humans, plants, or animals. The ch'i of the ancestors could be prayed to because the materiality of their descendants was the same ch'i, but even this continuity could not survive more than a few generations. Again, the Jesuits were shocked at this atheistic view of the human soul and its eventual demise materially with no possible eternal life after death.Accordingly, Kim's careful study of what Chu Hsi thought about the natural world makes it evident that most modern studies have elided an essential aspect of traditional Chinese thought, particularly the centrality of ch'i in the dynamic processes of collection and dispersion that produce all things, whether living or inanimate. Students of Chinese philosophy have tended to prioritize those aspects of Chu Hsi's views on universal li and its instantiated forms that are more amenable to a Western, Judeo‐Christian‐Islamic reading drawn ultimately from the debate between Plato and Aristotle over the universal forms of particular things.Modern presentations, in other words, have failed to grasp why a generation of Jesuit scholars who spent their adulthood in China during the seventeenth century found Chu Hsi's views alien and dangerous. Kim deserves credit for going against the tide of twentieth‐century scholarly interpretation and restoring to Chu Hsi those aspects of his natural philosophy that have been conveniently repressed to make his views more palatable. Rather than just the builder of the orthodox brick wall of traditional Chinese moralism, we can see that Chu Hsi's natural philosphy challenged any view of the world that assumed theological differences between life and death, mind and body, or the spiritual and physical. (shrink)

For more than three decades, research into the psycholinguistics of pronoun interpretation has argued that hearers use various interpretation ‘preferences’ or ‘strategies’ that are associated with specific linguistic properties of antecedent expressions. This focus is a departure from the type of approach outlined in Hobbs , who argues that the mechanisms supporting pronoun interpretation are driven predominantly by semantics, world knowledge and inference, with particular attention to how these are used to establish the coherence of a discourse. On the basis (...) of three new experimental studies, we evaluate a coherence-driven analysis with respect to four previously proposed interpretation biases—based on grammatical role parallelism, thematic roles, implicit causality, and subjecthood—and argue that the coherence-driven analysis can explain the underlying source of the biases and predict in what contexts evidence for each will surface. The results further suggest that pronoun interpretation is incrementally influenced by probabilistic expectations that hearers have regarding what coherence relations are likely to ensue, together with their expectations about what entities will be mentioned next, which, crucially, are conditioned on those coherence relations. (shrink)

Sibley, Kello, Plaut, and Elman (2008) proposed the sequence encoder as a model that learns fixed‐width distributed representations of variable‐length sequences. In doing so, the sequence encoder overcomes problems that have restricted models of word reading and recognition to processing only monosyllabic words. Bowers and Davis (2009) recently claimed that the sequence encoder does not actually overcome the relevant problems, and hence it is not a useful component of large‐scale word‐reading models. In this reply, it is noted that the (...) sequence encoder has facilitated the creation of large‐scale word‐reading models. The reasons for this success are explained and stand as counterarguments to claims made by Bowers and Davis. (shrink)

The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed thesequence encoderis used to learn nearly 75,000 wordform representations through exposure to strings of stress‐marked phonemes or letters. First, the mechanisms and efficacy of the sequence encoder are demonstrated and shown to overcome problems with traditional slot‐based (...) codes. Then, two large‐scale simulations are reported that learned to represent lexicons of either phonological or orthographic wordforms. In doing so, the models learned the statistics of their lexicons as shown by better processing of well‐formed pseudowords as opposed to ill‐formed (scrambled) pseudowords, and by accounting for variance in well‐formedness ratings. It is discussed how the sequence encoder may be integrated into broader models of lexical processing. (shrink)

We add to the constructivist approach of Quartz & Sejnowski (Q&S) by outlining a specific classification of sources of constraint on the emergence of representations from Elman et al. (1996). We suggest that it is important to consider behavioral constructivism in addition to neural constructivism.

The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed thesequence encoderis used to learn nearly 75,000 wordform representations through exposure to strings of stress‐marked phonemes or letters. First, the mechanisms and efficacy of the sequence encoder are demonstrated and shown to overcome problems with traditional slot‐based (...) codes. Then, two large‐scale simulations are reported that learned to represent lexicons of either phonological or orthographic wordforms. In doing so, the models learned the statistics of their lexicons as shown by better processing of well‐formed pseudowords as opposed to ill‐formed (scrambled) pseudowords, and by accounting for variance in well‐formedness ratings. It is discussed how the sequence encoder may be integrated into broader models of lexical processing. (shrink)