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Science 2 August 1991:
Vol. 253. no. 5019, pp. 530 - 535
DOI: 10.1126/science.1857983
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Articles

Science, Vol 253, Issue 5019, 530-535
Copyright © 1991 by American Association for the Advancement of Science

articles

Rules of language

S Pinker

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139.

Language and cognition have been explained as the products of a homogeneous associative memory structure or alternatively, of a set of genetically determined computational modules in which rules manipulate symbolic representations. Intensive study of one phenomenon of English grammar and how it is processed and acquired suggest that both theories are partly right. Regular verbs (walk-walked) are computed by a suffixation rule in a neural system for grammatical processing; irregular verbs (run-ran) are retrieved from an associative memory.


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