Jeffrey Elman

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Jeffrey Locke Elman ( January 22, 1948 - June 28, 2018 ) was an American cognitive scientist and linguist .

Elman graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree (AB) cum laude in 1969 and received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977 . In 1977 he became assistant professor, 1983 associate professor (for linguistics and from 1988 for cognitive science) and 1989 professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). In 2006 he became a Distinguished Professor there and in 1985 he was the founding director of the Center for Research in Language. From 1995 to 1998 he headed the Cognitive Science Department. In 2004 he was founding co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UCSD. From 2008 to 2014 he was Dean of Social Sciences.

He dealt with neural networks , neurolinguistics, and language processing and language perception. A variant of a recurrent neural network introduced by him is named after him the Elman network (also Simple Recurrent Neural Network, SRNN). With Jay McClelland , he developed the TRACE model for speech perception in the mid-1980s .

He is co-author of an influential book in the cognitive sciences, Rethinking Innateness , in which they position themselves against some theses of innate language acquisition and language processing patterns such as predetermined grammatical structures (as represented in particular by Noam Chomsky , Steven Pinker , Elizabeth Spelke ). According to Elman and colleagues, from a connectonistic point of view, they can only be coded as weights of neural networks in the genes, but from their point of view this is unlikely due to the plasticity of the brain in small children. Rather, it is the architectural properties of the neural networks in the brain in which genes are encoded.

He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016), the American Psychological Society (2015) and the Cognitive Science Society (2002), of which he was President in 1999/2000. In 2007 he received the David E. Rumelhart Prize .

Fonts

  • with Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, Kim Plunkett: Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development , MIT Press 1996
  • with K. Plunkett: Exercises in Rethinking Innateness: A Handbook for Connectionist Simulations, MIT Press 1997.
  • Editor with D. Touretzky, T. Sejnowski, G. Hinton: Connectionist Models Summer School Proceedings, Morgan Kauffmann 1990
  • Editors with M. Mozer, P. Smolensky, D. Touretzky, A. Weigand: Proceedings of the 1993 Connectionist Models Summer School, Erlbaum 1994
  • Language as a dynamical system, in: R. Port, T. van Gelder, Mind as motion: dynamical perspectives on behavior and cognition, MIT Press 1995
  • Language processing, in Michael Arbib , Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, MIT Press 1995, pp. 508-513
  • Finding Structure in Time, Cognitive Science, Volume 14, 1990, pp. 179-211 (Elman network)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Carol Padden, Marta Kutas : Passing of Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science Jeffrey L. Elman. UC San Diego, Division of Social Sciences, accessed July 6, 2018 .
  2. ↑ McClelland, Elman, The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, Volume 18, 1986, pp. 1-86
personal data
SURNAME Elman, Jeffrey
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Elman, Jeffrey Locke
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cognitive scientist and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH January 22, 1948
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 2018