Connectionism and Linguistic Regularities

[Elizabeth Bates]

There are some detailed responses to the regular/irregular morpheme
issue (initially raised by Pinker & Prince) in papers by Plunkett
and Marchman, Marchman and Plunkett, and in a more recent paper by
Brian MacWhinney.  In a nutshell: they manage to get a homogeneous
architecture to behave "as though" it had two mechanisms, one
for irregulars (encapsulated, undergeneralized) and one for
regulars (permeable, prone to overgeneralization).  The secret
lies in the statistical differences between regulars and irregulars
(i.e. type/token ratios).  Write to marchman at amos.ucsd.edu and
to brian+ at andrew.cmu.edu for copies of the relevant papers. -liz bates