Is language learning associationist or symbolic or both?
- Language learning seems hard. How is it possible?
- One approach is to focus on what sort of
knowledge the learner starts out with.
- Another approach is to focus on
what sort of learning mechanisms the
learner starts out with and how those mechanisms deal
the regularity in the input.
- Language learning seems to involve
statistical, similarity-based, associationist learning mechanisms.
- Language learning may also require
symbolic, rule-based learning mechanisms.
- Are two mechanisms really required?
Michael Gasser