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PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING (PDP)

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P200

2025-09-23

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PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING (PDP)

A description of the architecture of one type of connectionist model of language processing; the term is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘connectionism’.

Simulating the neural structure of the brain, connectionist models feature a large number of highly interconnected nodes or units. The power of the models lies not in the units themselves but in the connections between them. These connections increase or reduce the activation that runs between the units and may be strengthened or weakened as the result of experience.

Early connectionist models embodied an assumption that each unit represented a single piece of information. A typical facilitatory connection might be one between a unit which represented WRITE and one which represented WROTE. Later thinking modified this assumption, suggesting that a form such as WRITE or WROTE might not have a unit specifically dedicated to it but might be identified more abstractly, on the basis of a pattern of activation among a set of sub-units. In a PDP model, the representation of a word form is thus distributed across a number of units rather than being located in a single one.

See also: Connectionism, Parallel processing

Further reading: Whitney (1998: 105–8)