I think the PDP books are super interesting, have you read Jeffery Elman's Rethinking Innateness kind of a successor to PDP. Elman did some of the first work on recurrent neural networks I think
Geoff Hinton, some of who's work was in PDP, was an experimental psychologist by training.
Yes, Elman also worked on recurrent neural networks applied to language/text. A lot of word2vec stuff doesn’t seem too far off when you read the articles on clustering of recurrent (hidden) layer activations.
Geoff Hinton, some of who's work was in PDP, was an experimental psychologist by training.