A Connectionist Implementation of Cognitive Phonology

Abstract : This paper reports on initial results of an effort to actually implement Lakoff's theory of cognitive phonology in a connectionist framework. For all sorts of reasons, standard generative phonological theories cannot be implemented in connectionist frameworks. Lakoff's theory of cognitive phonology offers solutions to some of these problems in that it offers an alternative way to think about derivations and ordered rules, as well as eliminating the need for right-to-left iterative rule application. We will begin by describing our 'many maps' model and show how Lakoff's cross-level phonological constructions may be implemented. As will become clear, our basic assumption is that all phonological constructions should express correlations between levels and be satisfied in parallel, simultaneously, across the entire input domain. After describing the general properties of our model and how mappings between levels are actually implemented, we will consider a number of specific cases. In particular, we will focus on the those apparently involving iterative application of rules: Slovak shortening, Gidabal shortening, and vowel harmony in Yawelmani. Our challenge is obviously to provide alternative accounts of those cases involving intra-level rules in Lakoff's theory. We believe that the clustering mechanism allows us to do this. Finally, the complex rule interactions in Icelandic will be addressed, and we will show that our theory, though very tightly constrained, can handle this case as well. Keywords: Linguistics, Connectionist symbol, Processing.