Technical report available

[Mary Hare]

	"The Role of Similarity in Hungarian Vowel Harmony:
	            A connectionist account"

		    Technical Report CRL-9004

                           Mary Hare
                   Department of Linguistics
			       &
                Center for Research in Language

   Over the last 10 years, the assimilation process referred to as
vowel harmony has served as a test case for a number of proposals 
in phonological theory.  Current autosegmental approaches successfully
capture the intuition that vowel harmony is a dynamic process 
involving the interaction of a sequence of vowels; still, no
theoretical analysis has offered a non-stipulative account of
the inconsistent behavior of the so-called "transparent", or 
disharmonic, segments.

  The current paper proposes a connectionist processing account of 
the vowel harmony phenomenon, using data from Hungarian.  The strength 
of this account is that it demonstrates that the same general principle
of assimilation which underlies the behavior of the "harmonic" forms 
accounts as well for the apparently exceptional "transparent" cases, 
without stipulation.

   The account proceeds in three steps.  After presenting the data and
current theoretical analyses, the paper describes the model of
sequential processing introduced by Jordan (1986), and motivates this
as a model of assimilation processes in phonology.  The paper then
presents the results of a series of parametric studies that were
run with this model, using arbitrary bit patterns as stimuli.  These 
results establish certain conditions on assimilation in a network of 
this type.  Finally, these findings are related to the Hungarian data, 
where the same conditions are shown to predict the correct pattern of 
behavior for both the regular harmonic and irregular transparent vowels.

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Copies of this report may be obtained by sending an email request for
TR CRL-9004 to 'yvonne at amos.ucsd.edu', or surface mail to the Center for
Research in Language, C-008; University of California, San Diego; 
La Jolla CA 92093.