“ What is SP ? ” : a Reply

My interest in information compression as an explanatory principle in information processing was sparked originally by lectures given by Horace Barlow in Cambridge University describing phenomena in the workings of brains and nervous systems which could be understood in terms of economical coding of information (see, for example, Barlow, 1969; Barlow and Földiák, 1989). Later, an accumulation of evidence led me to the view that many aspects of language learning by children could be understood in these terms (Wolff, 1988).