Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-xxrs7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T19:14:56.454Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Blackboards in the brain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2006

Ralph-Axel Müller
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, San Diego State University, MC 1863, San Diego CA 92120 amueller@sciences.sdsu.edu http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/~amueller/index.html

Abstract

Although van der Velde's de Kamps's (vdV&dK) attempt to put syntactic processing into a broader context of combinatorial cognition is promising, their coverage of neuroscientific evidence is disappointing. Neither their case against binding by temporal coherence nor their arguments against recurrent neural networks are compelling. As an alternative, vdV&dK propose a blackboard model that is based on the assumption of special processors (e.g., lexical versus grammatical), but evidence from the cognitive neuroscience of language, which is, overall, less than supportive of such special processors, is not considered. As a consequence, vdV&dK's may be a clever model of syntactic processing, but it remains unclear how much we can learn from it with regard to biologically based human language.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)