Online research in philosophy

We address the notion of integration of new memory representations and the potential dependence of this phenomenon on sleep, in light of recent findings on the lexicalization of spoken words. A distinction is introduced between measures tapping directly into the strength of the newly acquired knowledge and indirect measures assessing the influence of this knowledge on spoken word identification.

I respond to Norris et al.'s criticism of Gaskell and Marslen- Wilson (1997). When the latter's network is tested in circumstances comparable to the Merge simulations in the target article, it produces the desired pattern of results. In another area of potential feedback in spoken word processing, aspects of lexical content influence word recognition and our network provides a simple explanation of why such effects emerge. It is unclear how such effects would be accommodated by Merge.

Learning a mapping involves finding regularities in a training set and generalization to novel patterns. Clark & Thornton's type distinction has been discussed in terms of generalization, but has limited value in this respect. However, in terms of detection of regularities in the training set, the distinction is more valid, as it provides a measure of complexity and correlates with the size of search space.