High-level language and thought

Noam Chomsky, in 1959, made a critical and influential attack on the idea that human language might be an example of a stimulus-response relationship, associatively learned by children. Training was carried out using a set of 700 verbs, in which the frequency of occurrence of words in the language was varied in terms of the number of times each verb was included in one run through the training set. Natural language has a well defined syntactic structure which forms the basis of its “compositional semantics”. The rules of grammar specify how the elements of language can be combined, and thereby define the set of legal sequences of symbols or expressions. Fodor and Pylyshyn argue that connectionist networks cannot develop representations that have the combinatorial structure necessary for language processing. If this is the case, connectionist networks cannot be the basis of complete accounts of cognition.