Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

H u m a n language and m e m o r y are only quasi-system- atic. They are composed of context free (systematic) niappings, context sensitive mappings, and idiosyncrasies. Consequently, generalizations to novel stimuli m a y be systematic if ihey result from the context free mappings or m a y Ixxome "regularized" toward k n o w n stimuli if they result from the context sensitive mappings. T w o factors that affect the degree of systematicity are the su-uc- ture of the training corpus and the amount of atten- tion or vigilance paid to the task. M o r e systematic uaining corpora and more attention produce more systematic responses and fewer specific context sen- sitive regularizations. A simple P D P model is used to demonstrate these phenomena. A 3-layer feedfor- ward network learns an auto-associative mapping. Untrained stimuli are tested to see if the model will respond with the systematic generalization or with a specific regularization by activating the out- put pattern for the nearest trained neighbor.