The prima facie unbounded nature of natural language, contrasted with the finite character of our memory and computational resources, is often taken to warrant a recursive language processing mechanism. The widely held distinction between an idealized infinite grammatical competence and the actual finite natural language performance provides further support for a recursive processor. In this paper, I argue that it is only necessary to postulate a recursive language mechanism insofar as the competence/performance distinction is upheld. However, I provide reasons for eschewing the latter and suggest that only data regarding observable linguistic behaviour ought to be used when modeling the human language mechanism. A connectionist model of language processing—the simple recurrent network proposed by Elman—is discussed as an example of a non-recursive alternative and I conclude that the computational power of such models promises to be sufficient to account for natural language behaviour.

What is the relationship between cognitive theories of symbol grounding and philosophical theories of meaning? In this paper we argue that, although often considered to be fundamentally distinct, the two are actually very similar. Both set out to explain how non-referring atomic tokens or states of a system can require status as semantic primitives within that system. In view of this close relationship, we consider what attempts to solve these problems can gain from each other. W e argue that, at least presently, work on symbol grounding is not likely to have an impact on philosophical theories of meaning. On the other hand, we suggest that the symbol grounding theorists have a lot to learn from their philosophical counterparts. In particular, the former must address the problems that have been identified in attempting to formulate philosophical theories of reference.