From Schema Theory to Language

Bringing together the perspectives of neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, this book introduces a new approach to the study of language. The authors propose schema theory as a unifying perspective in cognitive science and use three models to illustrate their argument: a study of sentence understanding applied to the analysis of data on aphasia; a "computational neo-Piagetian" approach to language acquisition in a two-year-old; and a model of how people describe visual scenes. The final chapter charts the value of the schema-theoretic approach to computational linguistics in particular and cognitive science in general as part of the search for commonalities between the representations and processes employed in linguistic and other cognitive domains.