ABSTRACT
In reaction to the notion that learning consists of direct links between stimulus inputs and behavioural responses, cognitive psychologists have stressed the importance of complex mental representations of knowledge. It is during the period that most conventional learning occurs, a child learns to talk, to read and write, to do arithmetic, to learn about history and science. A prior condition for learning is the storage of inputs as representations in declarative memory. The process of learning a skill is defined as replacing cumbersome general strategies with efficient task-specific productions, resulting from the combination of hitherto separate actions into coherent problem-solving procedures. The program's task was to deduce linguistic rules so that it could generate an appropriate sentence to represent each meaning structure. The J. J. simulation reflects the initial slow learning process by which a child maps very simple language structures on to objects and events in the environment.
