What do you mean by "associative model"? That doesn't map to anything I've heard of in cognitive science, statistics, machine learning, or Good Old-Fashioned AI.

But actually, I would expect different behaviors from an animal that learns language via a purely correlational and discriminative model (like most neural networks) versus a causal model. Causal models compress the empirical data better precisely because they're modelling sparse bones of reality rather than the abundant "meat" of correlated features. You should be able to generalize better and faster with a causal model than with a discriminative, correlative one.