Connectionist networks excel at extracting statistical
regularities but have trouble extracting higher-order relationships.
Clark & Thornton suggest that a solution to this problem might
come from Elman (1993), but I argue that the success of Elman's
single recurrent network is illusory, and show that it cannot in fact
represent abstract relationships that can be generalized to novel
instances, undermining Clark & Thornton's key
arguments.
