Two Derivations Suffice: The Role of Syllabification in Cognitive Phonology

Abstract : This report contains three parts from an ongoing research project on connectionist phonology. The first introduces syllabification into our many maps processing model. The second shows how syllabification and a previously- described clustering mechanism can be used jointly to implement the stress assignment rules of a number of languages. The third paper describes a preliminary version of a phonological rule-learning program whose rule syntax is determined by the architecture of our model. Earlier work in connectionist phonology is described in reports CMU-CS-89-144: A Connectionist Implementation of Cognitive Phonology, CMU-CS-89-158: Rules and Maps in Connectionist Symbol Processing, and CMU-CS-90-112: Rules and Maps II: Recent Progress in Connectionist Symbol Processing. Keywords: Linguistics; Phonology; Natural language; Connectionist modeling.