Inspiration
TRACE was created during the formative period of connectionism, and was included as a chapter in Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructures of Cognition. The researchers found that certain problems regarding speech perception could be conceptualized in terms of a connectionist interactive activation model. The problems were that (1) speech is extended in time, (2) the sounds of speech (phonemes) overlap with each other, (3) the articulation of a speech sound is affected by the sounds that come before and after it, and (4) there is natural variability in speech (e.g. foreign accent) as well as noise in the environment (e.g. busy restaurant). Each of these causes the speech signal to be complex and often ambiguous, making it difficult for the human mind/brain to decide what words it is really hearing. In very simple terms, an interactive activation model solves this problem by placing different kinds of processing units (phonemes, words) in isolated layers, allowing activated units to pass information between layers, and having units within layers compete with one another, until the “winner” is considered “recognized” by the model.
Read more about this topic: Trace (psycholinguistics)
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“The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)