On Look-Ahead in Language: Navigating a Multitude of Familiar Paths

The problem of multimodal concurrent serial order in behavior

“…A number of recent computational modeling efforts achieved some success in learning language in an unsupervised manner exclusively from transcribed speech or written text, unannotated with respect to prosody, gesture, or any other "extralinguistic" cues (van Zaanen, 2000;Adriaans and Vervoort, 2002;Solan A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t Figure 1: The multimodal, concurrent nature of the "primary linguistic data" (reproduced from Edelman, 2011;cf. Goldstein, Waterfall, Lotem, Halpern, Schwade, Onnis, and Edelman, 2010).…”

“…The LSC framework includes both formal semantics and software development tools and is based on "multi-modal scenarios, each corresponding to an individual requirement, specifying what can, must, or may not happen following certain sequences of events" A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t (Harel, Marron, and Weiss, 2012). LSC is a dual formalism to that of statecharts (Harel, 1988(Harel, , 2007, which came up as a candidate formalism in our earlier work (Edelman, 2011;Goldstein et al, 2010;Kolodny et al, 2015;Edelman, 2015b). Whereas statecharts focus on states that a system can occupy (including a superposition or Cartesian product of several states at once), Live Sequence Charts focus on processes and events.…”

Coevolution of learning and data-acquisition mechanisms: a model for cognitive evolution

“…There seems to be a large gap between the associative learning described earlier and the mechanisms required for higher cognitive abilities, such as the ability to construct cognitive maps, to acquire language, or to represent the knowledge held by others [41][42][43][44]. To develop such abilities, humans and animals must learn the statistical regularities in the data, which in turn will enable them to learn how the data are structured, both spatially and temporally.…”

An empirical generative framework for computational modeling of language acquisition

“…In other words, traditional units like nouns, verbs, noun phrases, verb phrases and clauses can be built up by referencing n-grams and their clustering. Additional possible uses of the new insights from developmental psycholinguistics in devising more powerful and psychologically relevant algorithms for empirical generative grammar learning are the subject of ongoing research (Edelman, 2010).…”