posed of cells called neurons and the pathways—dendrites and axons—that
allow neurons to communicate with one another through synapses, junction
switches that facilitate information processing. Learning involves changes in
the brain’s cell structure, changes that literally grow the network to accom-
modate the new knowledge. The more a person learns, the more extensive the
neural network.
Rule-governed models like the minimalist program assume that mental ac-
tivity or thought is verbal—any given sentence begins as mentalese.
Connectionism, on the other hand, suggests that it is a mistake to assume that
cognitive activities are verbal just because everyone reports hearing a mental
voice when thinking. Instead, as we saw earlier, it proposes that mental activi-
ties are primarily (though not exclusively) imagistic.^4 Our language itself con-
tains the essence of this proposal, for “seeing” is synonymous with
understanding. We “look” at problems and try to “focus” on issues. When lis-
tening to someone speak, we try to “see” their point. We process the world as
we “see” it, not as we smell, hear, or taste it. Visualization is at the core of un-
derstanding and language and also appears to be at the core of mental activities.
This point is important for a number of reasons, but one of the more relevant
is that it allows language processing to be understood as a matter of matching
words with mental representations and internalized models of reality. On this
account, the structure of language is not governed by rules but bypatterns of
regularity(Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986). As we shall see, the difference
here is significant.
Let’s note first that these patterns begin establishing themselves at birth.^5
When children encounter the world, their parents and other adults provide them
with the names of things. Children see dogs, for instance, and they immediately
are provided the word “dog,” with the result being that they develop a mental
image, or model, related to “dog-ness”: four legs, hairy, barks, licks, pet, and so
on. As a child develops and has more experience with dogs, his or her mental
model for “dog-ness” grows to include the range of features that typify dogs.
These features are part of the mental representation and the string of sounds, or
phonemes, that make up the word “dog.” The representations exist as cell
structures in the brain.
210 CHAPTER 6
(^4) Some educators have proposed that, if mentation is largely imagistic, then immersing children in
highly visual activities will enhance learning. As Katz (1989) noted, however, such activities usually do
not include a verbal component. Images appear to be native to mental operations, whereas language is
not. Thus, language must arise out of social interactions. 5
Pinker and Prince (1988) and Pinker (2002) strongly criticized connectionism, arguing that it is es-
sentially identical to the behaviorism model (long obsolete), which proposed that language acquisition
was based solely on experience with and memorization of linguistic input. There are, however, some sig-
nificant differences. Connectionism, for example, recognized that language ability is innate and geneti-
cally based, whereas behaviorism did not. Indeed, behaviorism rejected all notions of innateness.