Endress Ansgar D, Dehaene-Lambertz Ghislaine, Mehler Jacques
International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy.
Cognition. 2007 Dec;105(3):577-614. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.014. Epub 2007 Feb 5.
Cognitive processes are often attributed to statistical or symbolic general-purpose mechanisms. Here we show that some spontaneous generalizations are driven by specialized, highly constrained symbolic operations. We explore how two types of artificial grammars are acquired, one based on repetitions and the other on characteristic relations between tones ("ordinal" grammars). Whereas participants readily acquire repetition-based grammars, displaying early electrophysiological responses to grammar violations, they perform poorly with ordinal grammars, displaying no such electrophysiological responses. This outcome is problematic for both general symbolic and statistical models, which predict that both types of grammars should be processed equally easily. This suggests that some simple grammars are acquired using perceptual primitives rather than general-purpose mechanisms; such primitives may be elements of a "toolbox" of specialized computational heuristics, which may ultimately allow constructing a psychological theory of symbol manipulation.
认知过程通常被归因于统计或符号通用机制。在此我们表明，一些自发的概括是由专门的、高度受限的符号操作驱动的。我们探究了两种人工语法是如何习得的，一种基于重复，另一种基于声调之间的特征关系（“序数”语法）。虽然参与者能够轻松习得基于重复的语法，对语法违规表现出早期电生理反应，但他们在序数语法方面表现不佳，没有表现出此类电生理反应。这一结果对一般符号模型和统计模型而言都存在问题，因为这两种模型都预测这两种类型的语法应该同样易于处理。这表明一些简单语法是通过感知原语而非通用机制习得的；此类原语可能是专门计算启发式“工具箱”的元素，这最终可能有助于构建符号操作的心理学理论。
