A connectionist account of French syllabification

Abstract In this paper, we present a connectionist approach to phonology. We show that a process like syllabification, which in a symbolic framework is generally thought of as being the outcome of some kind of parsing by a dedicated algorithm, can be accounted for in a pure dynamic way. In this approach, syllables and syllabic constituency are by no means primitives and the labelling of syllable parts is not axiomatic. They are the by-product of the linear integration process of segments. In other words, syllables are not the building parts of words. On the contrary, in as much as words are made of sounds, given the dynamic properties of those sounds and in particular their tendency to interact in a continuous manner, our model predicts that the aggregation of sounds will give rise to self-organized processes from which syllables and syllabic constituents finally emerge. The universality of syllabic organisation in human languages is thus given a materialistic, quasi-phonetic grounding.