6.2 Serial and Connectionist Models
Serial models consist of a series of boxes arranged in strict order. These process
a message into language and then articulate it. The evidence cited in §1.5 and
at the beginning of §6.1 shows that serial language perception and production
is unrealistic. Serial models begin with a ”message level”, Garret (1980) [13],
and thus at the beginning requires thought, in the form of semantic content, to
exist without talk, in the form of tangible language. In connectionist models of
language and word production, for example Seidenberg and McClelland (1989)
[40] p.527, the semantic aspects of the model are put in by hand.
6.3 Language Production
The very words ”model of language production” assume that some starting
structure is metamorphosed into some finishing structure. In the present case it
is clear that the finishing structure is speech and other forms of language, but
it is not clear what the starting structure is. In other words, what language is
supposed to be produced from. Now we consider how this appears to be done
for serial, connectionist, and interactive models respectively. In serial models,
Garret (1980) [13], the starting structure is the message level; here there are
collections of amorphous thoughts which the production process crystalizes into
language. Now this begs an assumption, because it implies that thought can
exist prior to and/or independently of words. There appears to be a lot of
scope as to how meanings of words can be accommodated within connectionistic
models, for example Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) [38] p.99 say:
”there is an implicit assumption that word meanings can be repre-
sented as a set of sememes. This is a contentious issue. There ap-
pears to be a gulf between the componential view in which meaning
is a set of features and the structuralist view in which the mean-
ing of a word can only be defined in terms of its relationships to
other meanings. Later ... we consider one way of integrating these
two views by allowing articulate representations to be built out of a
number of different sets of active features.”
The componential view is a sort of correspondence theory of meaning, and sim-
ilarly the structuralist view a coherence theory of meaning, for definitions of
these terms see Roberts (1998) [36]. In interaction models the situation is a
more complex than in serial models; here, according to Stemberger (1985) [44]
p.148, the starting structure is a ”word in quotation marks which represents
its meaning”. This cannot really be a starting point because it requires that a
word has meaning in isolation, i.e. that context is irrelevant. It has been argued
by Frege, Davidson, and others that not only the material context but also the
context of a word in a sentence is necessary for an unambiguous assignment of
meaning to a word. An example of an ambiguous word is ”bank”, what sort of
bank is being referred to can be disambiguated by a sentence or perhaps some
other source of information. An example of context ambiguity is: ”1st speaker
13