Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

AI approaches to natural language specify computational processes, yet they are based on thestructural concepts of language and grammar which posit necessary conditions at least for the"correct" interpretations of utterances and often also for the syntactic and/or logical representations of utterances. We argue that any such view will fail to account for a variety ofimportant features of language behavior, which we describe. Systems based on the language/grammar model are usually accompanied by heuristic or algorithmic search/selection methods ofcomputation. We contrast these methods with constructive {leuchistic) computation models based on redundant, inconsistent sets of constraints, and show that this view offers naturalaccounts of the phenomena described.