Jeffrey Elman

• PhD
• Chair at University of California, San Diego

Purpose This study investigated whether the ability to utilize statistical regularities from fluent speech and map potential words to meaning at 18-months predicts vocabulary at 18- and again at 24-months. Method Eighteen-month-olds (N = 47) were exposed to an artificial language with statistical regularities within the speech stream, then partici...

Knowledge of common events is central to many aspects of cognition. Intuitively, it seems as though events are linear chains of the activities of which they are comprised. In line with this intuition, a number of theories of the temporal structure of event knowledge have posited mental representations (data structures) consisting of linear chains o...

Our knowledge of events and situations in the world plays a critical role in our ability to understand what is happening around us, to predict what might happen next, and to comprehend language. What has not been so clear is the form and structure of this knowledge, how it is learned, and how it is deployed in real time. Despite many important theo...

The nature–nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be pos...

Periodically in science there arrive on the scene what appear to be dramatically new theoretical frameworks (what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has called paradigm shifts). Characteristic of such changes in perspective is the recasting of old problems in new terms. By altering the conceptual vocabulary we use to think about problems, we ma...

Although the size of a child's vocabulary associates with language-processing skills, little is understood regarding how this relation emerges. This investigation asks whether and how the structure of vocabulary knowledge affects language processing in English-learning 24-month-old children (N = 32; 18 F, 14 M). Parental vocabulary report was used...

During incremental language comprehension, the brain activates knowledge of described events, including knowledge elements that constitute semantic anomalies in their linguistic context. The present study investigates hemispheric asymmetries in this process, with the aim of advancing our understanding of the neural basis and functional properties o...

Recent research suggests that infants tend to add words to their vocabulary that are semantically related to other known words, though it is not clear why this pattern emerges. In this paper, we explore whether infants leverage their existing vocabulary and semantic knowledge when interpreting novel label-object mappings in real time. We initially...

Despite extensive evidence that adults and children rapidly activate world knowledge to generate expectancies for upcoming language, little work has explored how this knowledge is initially acquired and used. We explore this question in 3- to 10-year-old children and adults by measuring the degree to which sentences depicting recently learned conne...

Unlabelled: One remarkable characteristic of speech comprehension in typically developing (TD) children and adults is the speed with which the listener can integrate information across multiple lexical items to anticipate upcoming referents. Although children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show lexical deficits (Sheng & McGregor, 2010) an...

Recently, our laboratory has shown that the neural mechanisms for encoding lexico-semantic information in adults operate functionally by 12-18 months of age within left frontotemporal cortices (Travis et al., 2011. Spatiotemporal neural dynamics of word understanding in 12- to 18-month-old-infants. Cereb Cortex. 8:1832-1839). However, there is mini...

The brain is able to acquire information about an unknown word's meaning from a highly constraining sentence context with minimal exposure. In this study, we investigate the potential contributions of the cerebral hemispheres to this ability. Undergraduates first read weakly or strongly constraining sentences completed by known or unknown (novel) w...

We combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) with magnetic resonance imaging and electrocorticography to separate in anatomy and latency 2 fundamental stages underlying speech comprehension. The first acoustic-phonetic stage is selective for words relative to control stimuli individually matched on acoustic properties. It begins ∼60 ms after stimulus o...

We investigated the impact of contextual constraint on the integration of novel word meanings into semantic memory. Adults read strongly or weakly constraining sentences ending in known or unknown (novel) words as scalp-recorded electrical brain activity was recorded. Word knowledge was assessed via a lexical decision task in which recently seen kn...

Recent research has demonstrated that knowledge of real-world eventsplays an important role inguiding online language comprehension. The present study addresses the scope of event knowledge activation during the course of comprehension, specifically investigating whether activation is limited to those knowledge elements that align with the local li...

Learning words is central in human development. However, lacking clear evidence for how or where language is processed in the developing brain, it is unknown whether these processes are similar in infants and adults. Here, we use magnetoencephalography in combination with high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging to noninvasively estima...

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words - with primary interest on rules - this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon...

In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional re...

Knowledge of the neural basis of early language is limited because of the difficulties in assessing functional brain activity during infancy. Consequently, it is unclear whether infants and adults depend on similar underlying neural structures to understand words. Advances in magnetoencephalography combined with magnetic resonance imaging now make...

Task diagram. Language order and modality order within language were counterbalanced across subjects. (TIF)

Regions of interest (ROIs) selected for statistical analysis. Abbreviations: STS: superior temporal sulcus; LOT: lateral occipitotemporal; VOT: ventral occipitotemporal. (TIF)

Bilingualism provides a unique opportunity for understanding the relative roles of proficiency and order of acquisition in determining how the brain represents language. In a previous study, we combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of word processing in a group of Spanish-E...

This research tests whether comprehenders use their knowledge of typical events in real time to process verbal arguments. In self-paced reading and event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific patient noun (brakes or spelling) depended on the combination of an agent and verb (mechanic chec...

Humans have the remarkable capacity to learn words from a single instance. The goal of this study was to examine the impact of initial learning context on the understanding of novel word usage using event-related brain potentials. Participants saw known and unknown words in strongly or weakly constraining sentence contexts. After each sentence cont...

Studies with monolingual adults have identified successive stages occurring in different brain regions for processing single written words. We combined magnetoencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging to compare these stages between the first (L1) and second (L2) languages in bilingual adults. L1 words in a size judgment task evoked a typical...

Sibley, Kello, Plaut, and Elman (2008) proposed the sequence encoder as a model that learns fixed-width distributed representations of variable-length sequences. In doing so, the sequence encoder overcomes problems that have restricted models of word reading and recognition to processing only monosyllabic words. Bowers and Davis (in press) recently...

Anticipation plays a role in language comprehension. In this article, we explore the extent to which verb sense influences expectations about upcoming structure. We focus on change of state verbs like shatter, which have different senses that are expressed in either transitive or intransitive structures, depending on the sense that is used. In two...

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words-with primary interest on rules-this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is...

The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed the sequence encoder is used to learn nearly 75,000 w...

No theory remains fixed for ever, at least not until it is abandoned. Theories develop over time. Some changes reflect the discovery of new facts that prompt modification of the earlier version. And often, especially in the case of theories that are tied to mechanisms, changes arise because with time comes a deeper understanding of the mechanism's...

For more than three decades, research into the psycholinguistics of pronoun interpretation has argued that hearers use various interpretation ‘preferences’ or ‘strategies’ that are associated with specific linguistic properties of antecedent expressions. This focus is a departure from the type of approach outlined in Hobbs (1979), who argues that t...

Theoretical considerations, and findings from computational modeling, comparative neuroanatomy and developmental neuroscience, motivate the hypothesis that a deviant brain growth trajectory will lead to deviant patterns of change in cortico-cortical connectivity. Differences in brain size during development will alter the relative cost and effectiv...

What Happened to the Study of Change? The First Computer Metaphor and its Implications for Development The Second Computer Metaphor and Its Implications for Development Some Common Misconceptions about Connectionism Epilogue: New Directions in Developmental Connectionism

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been giv...

The ability of magnetoencephalography (MEG) to accurately localize neuronal currents and obtain tangential components of the source is largely due to MEG's insensitivity to the conductivity profile of the head tissues. However, MEG cannot reliably detect the radial component of the neuronal current. In contrast, the localization accuracy of electro...

Recent story completion studies (Arnold 2001, Rohde et al. 2006) show that passages exhibiting different coherence relations yield different patterns of pronoun interpretation. These results predict that a shift in the distribution of coherence relations in participant responses ought to induce a shift in the distribution of pronoun interpretations...

Computational models have become increasingly important in the field of child language acquisition. This reflects not only the increased accessibility of hardware and software, but more importantly, significant advances in the field of machine learning that have led to more sophisticated understanding about biologically plausible learning mechanism...

What features of brain processing and neural development support linguistic and cognitive development in young children? To what extern arc the profile and timing of development in young children determined by a preordained genetic programme? Does the environment play a crucial role in determining the patterns of change observed in children growing...

Variations in the amount and nature of early language to which children are exposed have been linked to their subsequent ability (e.g. Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer & Lyons, 1991; Hart & Risley, 1995). In three computational simulations, we explore how differences in linguistic experience can explain differences in word learning ability due t...

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in conju...

In a story completion study involving transfer-of-possession passages (John handed a book to Bob. He _____), Stevenson et al. (1994) identified a pronoun interpretation preference that is compatible with two possible explanations: a superficial thematic role bias for Goals over Sources, and a deeper event structure bias toward focusing on the end s...

We describe a pronoun interpretation experiment in which a Coherence Hypothesis is tested against preference-based analyses of pronoun interpretation, including the Parallel Function Preference and the Subject Preference. We demonstrate that preferences can be systematically disrupted through the manipulation of coherence, and that only the Coheren...

We describe two pronoun interpretation experiments in which a Cohere nce Hypothesis is tested against preference-based accounts. The Coherence Hypothesis holds that apparent preferences in antecedent selection are actually byproducts of the infere ncing processes used to establish different types of coherence. In Experiment 1 we s how that preferen...

We explore the implications of an event-based expectancy generation approach to language understanding, suggesting that one useful strategy employed by comprehenders is to generate expectations about upcoming words. We focus on two questions: (1) What role is played by elements other than verbs in generating expectancies? (2) What connection exists...

Over the past two decades, connectionist models have generated a lively debate regarding the underlying mechanisms of cognitive development. This debate has in turn led to important empirical research that might not have occurred otherwise. More recently, advances in developmental neuroscience present a new set of challenges for modelers. In this a...

We examined whether event knowledge about the roles that nouns play in specific events interacts with the morphological form of active and passive verbs during short SOA (250 ms), noun-verb semantic priming. In Experiment 1, we investigated how quickly participants pronounce verbs inflected with -ing or -ed (arresting vs. arrested) when preceded by...

An essential aspect of knowing language is knowing the words of that language. This knowledge is usually thought to reside in the mental lexicon, a kind of dictionary that contains information regarding a word's meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on. In this article, a very different view is presented. In this view, words are...

this article, a very different view is presented. In this view, words are understood as stimuli that operate directly on mental states. The phonological, syntactic and semantic properties of a word are revealed by the effects it has on those states

Linguistic and psycholinguistic research has documented that there exists a close relationship between a verb's meaning and the syntactic structures in which it occurs, and that learners and comprehenders take advantage of this relationship both in acquisition and in processing. We address implications of these facts for issues in structural ambigu...

NPs Postverbal Inanimate # # # # # # # # # DO vs. SC-0 Predicting SC-0 vs. SC-That The old man felt the restaurant bill was exorbitant.

o the second issue first, since it underpins our response to the first. If we take the term `innate knowledge' seriously (e.g. knowledge, say, of the abstract constraints that obtain on human languages being available to the child prior to linguistic experience), then these must be encoded in the brain as a particular pattern of synaptic connectivi...

Traditionally, research has been defined as being about development if it focuses on behaviors that occur during development, without reference either to what precedes or follows, or – more importantly – the mechanisms that drive change. This perspective has been challenged by two new approaches: dynamical systems, and connectionism, both of which...

Traditionally, research has been defined as being about development if it focuses on behaviors that occur during development, without reference either to what precedes or follows, or -- more importantly -- the mechanisms that drive change. This perspective has been challenged by two new approaches: dynamical systems, and connectionism, both of whic...

this paper, I would like to discuss several problems that arise as a result of the following conundrum

Readers are sensitive to the fact that verbs may allow multiple subcategorization frames that differ in their probability of occurrence. Although a verb’s overall subcategorization preferences can be described probabilistically, underlying non-random factors may determine those probabilities. One potential factor is verb semantics: Many verbs show...

Over the past decade, it has been clear that even very young infants are sensitive to the statistical structure of language input presented to them, and use the distributional regularities to induce simple grammars. But can such statistically-driven learning also explain the acquisition of more complex grammar, particularly when the grammar include...

This paper illustrates this by showing that the "parade case of an innate constraint " (Crain, 1991) i.e., Chomsky's (1975) poverty of stimulus argument that structure dependence must be a principle of UG fails to hold once stochastic information is admitted; the property of language in question is shown to be learnable with a statistical learning...

Summary form only given. Development represents a period in an organism's life during which it is at risk; the immature individual is unable to fend for itself, obtain food or protection, and is highly dependent on its caretakers. Given the apparent maladaptive nature of prolonged development, it is thus something of a puzzle that the human species...

Introduction Despite considerable diversity among theories about how humans process language, there are a number of fundamental assumptions which are shared by most such theories. This consensus extends to the very basic question about what counts as a cognitive process. So although many cognitive scientists are fond of referring to the brain as a...

Based on the apparent paucity of input, and the non-obvious nature of linguistic generalizations, Chomskyan linguists assume an innate body of linguistically detailed knowledge, known as Universal Grammar (UG), and at-tribute to it principles required to account for those "prop-erties of language that can reasonably be supposed not to have been lea...

We present and analyze the results of a connectionist simulation which modeled the reanalysis of Latin gender system in its transition to Old French. The network reanalysis was based solely on the formal cues (word endings and analogy with other words) and on frequency. The results are in accordance with the historical data, and certain errors in s...

Introduction Language is puzzling. On the one hand, there are compelling reasons to believe that the possession of language by humans has deep biological roots. We are the only species that has a communication system with the complexity and richness of language. There are cases of non-human primates who can be taught (sometimes only with heroic eff...

This paper proposes an account of the acquisition of grammatical relations using the basic concepts of connectionism and a construction-based theory of grammar. Many previous accounts of first-language acquisition assume that grammatical relations (e.g., the grammatical subject and object of a sentence) and linking rules are universal and innate; t...

This paper discusses the simulation results of a model of biological development for neural networks based on a regulatory genome. The network development is controlled by genes that produce elements regulating the activation, inhibition, and delay of neurogenetic events. An ecological task of foraging behavior is used to test the model with an evo...

Introduction It is well established that sentences of natural language are more than just a linear arrangement of words. Sentences also contain complex structural relationships between words that are often characterized syntactically, such as phrase structures, relative clauses and subject verb agreement. Representing and processing such structure...

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This paper gives an overview of some novel algorithms for reinforcement learning in nonstationary possibly reactive environments. I have decided to describe many ideas briefly rather than going into great detail on any one idea. The paper is structured as follows: In the first section some terminology is introduced. Then there follow five sections,...

We enjoyed reading Matthew Rispoli's review of Rethinking innateness (henceforth RI-Elman et al. 1996). First, we respond to what we see as the major issues that he raises. Finally, we respond to the commentaries contributed by other authors in this issue. Rispoli has two major concerns. First, he fears that RI will do the field a great disservice,...

Parallel distributed processing (PDP) architectures demonstrate a potentially radical alternative to the traditional theories of language processing that are based on serial computational models. However, learning complex structural relationships in temporal data presents a serious challenge to PDP systems. For example, automata theory dictates tha...

Researchers in analog computation theory have shown that a recurrent neural network (RNN) can be built to simulate a Turing machine (Pollack, 1987b; Siegelmann & Sontag, 1995). Recently, we showed that it is possible to train RNNs which imple ment some aspects of analog computation theory-namely a network can develop trajectories that count symbols...

the term ‘innate knowledge’ seriously (e.g. knowledge, say, of the abstract constraints,that obtain,on human languages being available to the child prior to linguistic experience), then these must be encoded in the brain as a particular pattern,of synaptic connectivity within a specific neural,system. This Address for correspondence: Neurocognitive...

The research carried out under this contract focussed on four efforts, all involving the processing of temporal sequences by neural networks (1-3) or the effect of imposing a spatio-temporal gradient on network learning (4): (1) Assessing alternative neural network techniques for problems involving temporal coding. (2) Development of tools for anal...

Introduction If human behavior were list-like, accounting for human behavior would be simple: Just enumerate the list of possible stereotypies. Alternatively, if behavior were predictable on the basis of abstract, fully-productive, context-insensitive rules, our task would be different but similarly straightforward: just list the underlying rules....

We add to the constructivist approach of Quartz & Sejnowski (Q&S) by outlining a specific classification of sources of constraint on the emergence of representations from Elman et al. (1996). We suggest that it is important to consider behavioral constructivism in addition to neural constructivism.

What features of brain processing and neural development support linguistic and cognitive development in young children? To what extent are the profile and timing of development in young children determined by a preordained genetic programme? Does the environment play a crucial role in determining the patterns of change observed in children growing...

Infants can learn more and earlier than we thought. A new result in this week's issue [Saffran et al . ( p. 1926 )] reports that a surprisingly brief exposure to nonsense syllables can fuel the absorption of a sophisticated understanding of their use. Bates and Elman discuss these results in the context of the ongoing debate about whether and how l...

Rethinking Innateness asks the question, "What does it really mean to say that a behavior is innate?" The authors describe a new framework in which interactions, occurring at all levels, give rise to emergent forms and behaviors. These outcomes often may be highly constrained and universal, yet are not themselves directly contained in the genes in...

Recent PDP models have been shown to have great promise in contributing to the understanding of the mechanisms which subserve language processing. In this paper we address the specific question of how multiply embedded sentences might be processed. It has been shown experimentally that comprehension of center-embedded structures is poor relative to...

The paper describes simulations on populations of neural networks that both evolve at the population level and learn at the individual level. Unlike other simulations, the evolutionary task (finding food in the environment) and the learning task (predicting the next position of food on the basis of present position and planned network's movement) a...

A potential problem for connectionist accounts of inflectional morphology is the need to learn a “default” inflection (Prasada & Pinker, 1993). The early connectionist work of Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) might be interpreted as suggesting that a network can learn to treat a given inflection as the “elsewhere” case only if it applies to a much l...