Books on the topic 'Neural Language Model'

The diffusion model is one of the major sequential-sampling models for two-choice decision-making and choice response time in psychology. The model conceives of decision-making as a process in which noisy evidence is accumulated until one of two response criteria is reached and the associated response is made. The criteria represent the amount of evidence needed to make each decision and reflect the decision maker’s response biases and speed-accuracy trade-off settings. In this chapter we examine the application of the diffusion model in a variety of different settings. We discuss the optimality of the model and review its applications to a number of cognitive tasks, including perception, memory, and language tasks. We also consider its applications to normal and special populations, to the cognitive foundations of individual differences, to value-based decisions, and its role in understanding the neural basis of decision-making.

This chapter focuses on Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG), another computational implementation of Construction Grammar. It points out that the driving question of this framework is how language is used in actual physical and social contexts, and explains that ECG is an attempt to computationally model the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie human linguistic behavior. The chapter evaluates the role of mental simulation in processing and outlines how language can be seen as in interface to simulation. It also shows how constructions are represented in ECG and describes an ECG-based model of language comprehension.

Causal explanations in the high-level sciences typically black-box the low-level details of the causal mechanisms that they invoke to account for their explananda: economists’ black-box psychological processes, psychologists’ black-box neural processes, and so on. Are these black-boxing explanatory models complete explanations of the phenomena in question, or are they just sketches of or templates for the whole explanatory story? This chapter poses a focused version of the question in the context of convergent evolution, the existence of which appears to show that underlying mechanisms are completely irrelevant to the explanation of high-level biological features, including perhaps thought and language—in which case a black-boxing model would be a complete explanation of such features rather than a mere sketch. Arguments for and against such a model’s explanatory completeness are considered; the chapter comes down tentatively against.

Among the “higher” functions, language and its cerebral networks is the most intensively explored through behavioral or clinical studies and, more recently, through functional neuroimaging. From the former studies, several models (only partially congruent) have emerged during the past three centuries regarding the organization and topography of the brain mechanisms of the acoustic, phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic operations in which psycholinguists have divided the language function. The main task of this chapter is to extract from the vast functional neuroimaging literature of language reliable evidence that would be used to disconfirm the various hypotheses comprising the current language models. Most of these hypotheses concern the anatomical structures that could be considered nodes or hubs of the neuronal networks mediating the above-mentioned linguistic operations. Using the same criteria, the authors present neuroimaging evidence relevant to the issue of the neuronal mediation of sign languages, reading, and dyslexia.

Communication between deities and human beings rests on the use of language. Religious language has peculiarities such as the use of a formal voice, reductions in first-person and elevation of third-person pronoun use, archaistic elements, and an abundance of speech acts—features that reflect and facilitate the binding of the individual to conceived ultimate reality and value, decentering the Self while focusing on the deity. Explorations of the neurologic correlates of these cognitive and linguistic processes may be useful to identify constraints on neurocognitive models of religious language, and metaphor. The key brain regions that may mediate religious language include neural networks known to be involved in computational assessments of value, future-oriented simulations, Self-agency, Self-reflection, and attributing intentionality of goals to others. Studies indicate that some of the areas involved in those processes are active during personal prayer, whereas brain regions related to habit formation appear active during formal prayer. By examining religious language, and the brain areas engaged by it, we aim to develop more comprehensive neurocognitive models of religious cognition.

Drawing an analogy between modal structuralism about mathematics and theism, this chapter offers a structuralist account that implicitly defines theism in terms of three basic relations: logical and metaphysical priority, and epistemic superiority. On this view, statements like “God is omniscient” have a hypothetical and a categorical component. The hypothetical component provides a translation pattern according to which statements in theistic language are converted into statements of second-order modal logic. The categorical component asserts the logical possibility of the theism structure on the basis of uncontroversial facts about the physical world. This structuralist reading of theism preserves objective truth-values for theistic statements while remaining neutral on the question of ontology. Thus, it offers a way of understanding theism to which a naturalist cannot object, and it accommodates the fact that religious belief, for many theists, is an essentially relational matter.

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of war may be turned against war by focusing on the views of William James, Kenneth Burke, and Stephen Crane. Recent literary criticism has suggested that, far from being powerless or simply neutral vis-à-vis the armed conflicts it seeks to represent, language is complicit with violence. This understanding of the relationship between language and violence has been filed by James Dawes under the rubric of “the disciplinary model”—a model that conceives language and violence “as mutually constitutive.” This chapter first considers the ways in which the hard facts of war and violence may be both acknowledged and worked through before discussing Burke's template for understanding the tension as well as the cooperation between war and peace. It also analyzes James's “The Moral Equivalent of War” and concludes by testing the usefulness of some of Burke's recommendations for literary studies through a reading of Crane's “A Mystery of Heroism.”

This chapter applies the model that was developed in Chapters 2 and 3 to some well-known and well-studied cases of palatal vowel harmony. Palatal harmony is common in, and almost confined to, Finno-Ugric and Altaic languages. In the latter, palatal harmony often co-occurs with labial harmony. The chapter first discusses variation in the behavior of neutral vowels in Balto-Finnic languages and some special cases in this family. It then analyzes palatal harmony systems in Hungarian and considers the systems of several other languages. The focus is on asymmetries in vowel harmony involving disharmonic suffixes, anti-harmonic roots, disharmonic roots, and non-alternating suffixes.

This chapter provides a conceptual framework for examining the delivery of bilingual healthcare for linguistic minorities in Canada’s Bilingual Belt. First, the chapter provides an overview of the ethnolinguistic vitality framework accounting for the sociostructural factors affecting the strength of minority and majority language communities within multilingual countries. Second, the interactive acculturation model (IAM) helps account for relations between high- and low-vitality group speakers whose intercultural relations may be harmonious, problematic, or conflictual. Third, the chapter provides a case study of a pluralist setting that offers three distinct bilingual healthcare systems for French and English communities in Canada’s Bilingual Belt. While the delivery of bilingual healthcare is cost neutral relative to unilingual healthcare systems, at issue is whether minority language patients achieve better health outcomes when they are cared for in their own language than in the language of the dominant majority.

Angelman syndrome (AS) is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder caused by maternal deficiency of the epigenetically imprinted gene UBE3A. It is characterized by severe developmental delay, an ataxic gait disorder, an apparent happy demeanor with frequent smiling or laughing, and severe expressive language impairments. Understanding the neurobiology of AS has focused on understanding how UBE3A is regulated by neuronal activity, as well as the targets of its ubiquitin E3 ligase activity. This has led to a model of the role of UBE3A in the regulation of experience-dependent sculpting of synaptic circuits. At this time, treatment is largely supportive, but efforts directed toward reversing the epigenetic silencing machinery may lead to improved synaptic function in AS patients.

For more than 2000 years Greek philosophers have thought about the puzzling introspectively assessed dichotomy between our physical bodies and our seemingly non-physical minds. How is it that we can think highly abstract thoughts, seemingly fully detached from actual, physical reality? Despite the obvious interactions between mind and body (we get tired, we are hungry, we stay up late despite being tired, etc.), until today it remains puzzling how our mind controls our body, and vice versa, how our body shapes our mind. Despite a big movement towards embodied cognitive science over the last 20 years or so, introductory books with a functional and computational perspective on how human thought and language capabilities may actually have come about – and are coming about over and over again – are missing. This book fills that gap. Starting with a historical background on traditional cognitive science and resulting fundamental challenges that have not been resolved, embodied cognitive science is introduced and its implications for how human minds have come and continue to come into being are detailed. In particular, the book shows that evolution has produced biological bodies that provide “morphologically intelligent” structures, which foster the development of suitable behavioral and cognitive capabilities. While these capabilities can be modified and optimized given positive and negative reward as feedback, to reach abstract cognitive capabilities, evolution has furthermore produced particular anticipatory control-oriented mechanisms, which cause the development of particular types of predictive encodings, modularizations, and abstractions. Coupled with an embodied motivational system, versatile, goal-directed, self-motivated behavior, learning becomes possible. These lines of thought are introduced and detailed from interdisciplinary, evolutionary, ontogenetic, reinforcement learning, and anticipatory predictive encoding perspectives in the first part of the book. A short excursus then provides an introduction to neuroscience, including general knowledge about brain anatomy, and basic neural and brain functionality, as well as the main research methodologies. With reference to this knowledge, the subsequent chapters then focus on how the human brain manages to develop abstract thought and language. Sensory systems, motor systems, and their predictive, control-oriented interactions are detailed from a functional and computational perspective. Bayesian information processing is introduced along these lines as are generative models. Moreover, it is shown how particular modularizations can develop. When control and attention come into play, these structures develop also dependent on the available motor capabilities. Vice versa, the development of more versatile motor capabilities depends on structural development. Event-oriented abstractions enable conceptualizations and behavioral compositions, paving the path towards abstract thought and language. Also evolutionary drives towards social interactions play a crucial role. Based on the developing sensorimotor- and socially-grounded structures, the human mind becomes language ready. The development of language in each human child then further facilitates the self-motivated generation of abstract, compositional, highly flexible thought about the present, past, and future, as well as about others. In conclusion, the book gives an overview over how the human mind comes into being – sketching out a developmental pathway towards the mastery of abstract and reflective thought, while detailing the critical body and neural functionalities, and computational mechanisms, which enable this development.