language knowledge in ACT-R

Considering the overwhelming number of papers and studies in the area, it is amazing that today (October 2009) there is no coherent, integrated theory of human language understanding and production. It's not that we lack a complete, highly-validated theory - it's that we lack a theory.

There are lots (and I mean lots) of formal models of grammar.
There are lots (and I mean lots) of experiments probing the human process of understanding and producing language.

And yet, as of today (Oct 5th 2009) I can't find an integrated theory that offers a cognitively plausible account of how a sentence is understood, or generated. It's not that we have one or more theories-with-shortcomings. What we have are hundreds of theories that cover at most a fraction of the area - even if you limit 'the area' to reading and comprehending (or generating) one factual sentence.

When I got into mind design, I thought the big unknowns would be things like compassion, ethics, emotions, self-model, episodic memory. And those are all big unknowns. I didn't expect that top-of-list would be 'language'.

So in my next post, I'll spend some time trying to assemble and make some sense of the little sample I've made of the vast literature on human language processing.