WWN-Text: Cortex-Like Language Acquisition with “What” and “Where”

Based on some recent advances in understanding and modeling cortical processing for space [1] and time [2], we propose a developmental, general purpose model for language acquisition using multiple motor areas. Through the ventral pathway, the “what” motor learns, abstracts and projects (as recurrent top-down context) information that is related to the meaning of the text. Via the dorsal pathway, the “where/how” motor learns, abstracts and projects (as top-down context) information that relates to the spatial information of text, e.g., where is the text on a page. This is a major departure from the traditional symbolic and connectionist approaches to natural language processing (NLP) — the nature of the motor areas, i.e., actions, of the developmental agent play the role of “hubs” in language acquisition and understanding. As any human communicable concept can be either verbally stated (what) or demonstrated through actions (how), this model seems to be the first general purpose developmental model for general language acquisition, although the size of experiments is still very small. Furthermore, unlike traditional NLP approaches, we do not use hand-crafted language structure but allow primary and secondary associations as seen in animal learning [3], as a general scheme for language acquisition.