Elman

Discuss the Elman reading here.

I - Introduction
"Acquisition is viewed, rather, as a search through the set of possible grammars for natural language, guided by successive inputs; or alternatively, as a parameter setting process in which the inputs serve as triggers" "The only reasonable conclusion is that UG contains the principle that all such rules must be structure-dependent" (Chomsky, 1975) "Together these results suggest that an SRN might be able to learn the structure of relative clauses..."

II - A Hint of Verification
"The network has thus generalized to predict the relative clause" "The network does not make the predictions corresponding to the ungrammatical form ...."

III - Child-Directed Speech
"Complexity increases over time -- which has been shown to be a determinant of learnability -- and there are also arguably meaningful shifts in the distribution of types, and limitations on forms." __Child-directed speech vs. speech between adults:__ "Child-directed speech contains a much greater proportion of questions...and thus there is more of a balance between types. This may be critical in establishing the multiple roles that, e.g. auxiliaries, can take on; and also to reserve representational space for the large variety of question forms." "The aux-questions in child-directed speech overwhelmingly use proper names, pronouns, deictics, and other such forms which do not provide the correct context for relative clauses."