Emergentism, connectionism and language learning

This review summarizes a range of theoretical ap-proaches to language acquisition. It argues that language representations emerge from interactions at all levels from brain to society. Simple learning mechanisms, operating in and across the human systems for perception,motor-action and cognition as they are exposed to language data as part of a social environment, suffice to drive the emergence of complex language representations. Connectionism pro-vides a set of computational tools for exploring the condi-tions under which emergent properties arise. I present various simulations of emergence of linguistic regularity for illustration. If it be asked: What is it you claim to be emergent?—the brief reply is Some new kind of relation.Consider the atom, the molecule, the thing (e.g., a crystal), the organism, the person. At each ascending step there is a new entity in virtue of some new kind of relation, or set of relations, within it... It may still be asked in what distinctive sense the relations are new. The reply is that their specific nature could not be predicted before they appear in the evidence, or prior to their occurrence. (Lloyd Morgan, 1925, pp. 64–65