Hebbian Self-Organizing Memories for Lexical Recoding and Processing

Hebbian self-organizing memories (Pirrelli et al. 2010, Ferro et al. 2011, Koutnik 2007) can provide a rigorous and testable conceptual framework within which to unify diverse functional hypotheses for lexical acquisition and processing, and to clarify how these hypotheses may be explained computationally. I discuss a few desiderata that any biologically-inspired computational model of the mental lexicon has to meet, and report on how well such desiderata are met by different types of Hebbian self-organizing memories, exhibiting empirically different maturational trends in lexical acquisition.