ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how connectionist models have been used to simulate normal and impaired development. The theory that a low-level perceptual deficit could lead to problems with sentence comprehension was tested in a connectionist model of sentence comprehension that learned to map a sentence's phonological form to its meaning. Modeling efforts have been applied to developmental impairments to oral language in children, and in particular whether affected children have difficulties with the rules of grammar. Perhaps the most closely studied and best understood developmental language disorder is developmental dyslexia. Language is an enormously complex cognitive ability and one that surely integrates a broad range of processes, ranging from low-level sensory abilities all the way to higher-level morphosyntactic, syntactic, semantic, contextual, and pragmatic knowledge. Models of reading and language impairments have incorporated simplifying assumptions about phonological representations that make it difficult to independently study perception and phonology.
