[SOUND] One way to consider how language is processed,
how cognition occurs is to think of it as a non-linear dynamical process.
Now, what would we describe as a non-linear dynamical process?
Well, we can take very famous examples.
For example, the idea that a butterfly might flap its wings over Africa and
create a storm in the Gulf of Mexico.
The idea is that very small changes can add up over time.
And as they add up and they multiply, what happens is you get
very big differences occurring, but they started out as very small differences.
People have taken this non-linear dynamical view of cognition.
The most famous example of this is by Mclelland and
Rumelhart, who proposed what's called a parallel distributed processing approach,
this idea that different streams of processing are occurring in parallel, and
they help to form cognition.