Connectionism and Linguistic Regularities

[AMR@IBM.COM]

Some time ago I was involved in a debate here about the NL and
connectionism.  I now have a specific question about a kind of
linguistic phenomenon which I find it difficult to see how connectionist
models would handle.  The phenomenon is that in many languages some
class of items (morphemes, words, phrases) behaves in a certain
completely regular way, yet this way of doing things becomes irregular
in the sense that new items do not behave the same way.  I am not sure
I can come up with very good examples from English, but it is as though
the domain of irregular past tenses or irregular plurals were predictable
in English (e.g., hypothetically all monosyllabic nouns ending in
the phonetic sequence  u:s  pluralize in  i:s , or the like), yet
when new words of this form enter the language they do not behave this
way and speakers have trouble recognizing the regularity on test involving
nonsense items of the right shape.  There is a growing body of such
examples in the linguistic literature, and to the extent that an
explanation is sought it is assumed to lie in some highly specific
(perhaps innate) properties of the human linguistic faculty.  This is
what makes me sceptical of the ability of connectionist architectures
to handle this kind of phenomenon, while at the same time, if they can,
that would be a striking piece of evidence in favor of the connectionist
approach.

Alexis Manaster-Ramer               amr at ibm.com  or  amr at yktvmh.bitnet

P.S. Can someone please remind me of the email address to use for
things such as getting people added to the mailing list?  Thanks.