Explaining Language Behavior

Reviews the books, The Harmonic Mind: From Neural Computation to Optimality-Theoretic Grammar, Volume I: Cognitive Architecture by Paul Smolensky and Géraldine Legendre (see record 2006-07970-000); and The Harmonic Mind: From Neural Computation to Optimality-Theoretic Grammar, Volume II: Linguistic and Philosophical Implications by Paul Smolensky and Géraldine Legendre (see record 2006-07974-000). Volume I is titled Cognitive Architecture and contains 12 chapters, which are divided into two parts. Part I is titled Toward a Calculus of the Mind/Brain: An Overview and contains four chapters. Among the topics addressed in this section are the issue of how connectionist and symbolic processing can be related and the question of the kind of computation system that is needed to describe the knowledge of human languages. Part II contains the remaining eight chapters and is titled Principles of the Integrated Connectionist/Symbolic Cognitive Architecture. This section addresses the issues introduced in the first section, with much more technical detail provided. It is in this section that the authors introduce the notion of harmonic grammar, which is a connectionist-based implementation of grammatical properties referred to in the prior literature as language rules. Volume II is titled Linguistic and Philosophical Implications and contains 11 chapters, also divided into two parts. The first part is titled Optimality Theory: The Cognitive Science of Language and contains nine chapters. These chapters discuss the important universal linguistic principles related to syllables, simple clauses, and question forms. In this section the authors explicate their notions about how their computational approach can provide insight into neural and genetic levels of analysis. The second part is titled Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Architecture and contains two chapters. These concluding chapters discuss the authors' view of the relation between connectionism and generative approaches to language, symbolic rules, and productivity of higher cognition. Without a doubt, these two volumes are ambitious. The authors tackle some of the most interesting grammatical facts discussed in prior linguistic research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)