Reports language acquisition experiments with simple recurrent networks solving phoneme prediction in continuous phonemic data, which suggests the network output could function as a source for syllable boundary detection. The phoneme prediction network simulates the necessary "bootstrap" to discover syllabic segmentation in unsegmented…

Presents model describing adult learning of morphosyntax in a novel language where frequency and regularity are factorially combined. Accuracy and latency data show frequency effects for both regular/irregular forms early in acquisition process; as learning progresses, frequency effect on regular items diminishes but remains for irregular items.…

Describes a connectionist model, using a simple recurrent network trained on a phoneme prediction task, that accounts for the child's ability to identify word boundaries. The model shows that aspects of linguistic structure that are not overtly marked in the input can be derived by efficiently combining multiple probabilistic cues. (Author/MSE)

Proposes an alternative account of the child's learning of nouns and adjectives that relies on properties of the semantic categories to be learned and of the word-learning task itself. In five experiments, a simple connectionist network was trained to label input objects in particular contexts; the network learned categories resembling nouns…

Developmental aspects of spelling-to-sound mapping for English monosyllabic words are investigated with a simple two-layer network model using a simple, general learning rule. The model is trained on both regularly and irregularly spelled words but extracts regular spelling to sound relationships, which it can apply to new words. Training-related…

Emphasizes that auditory lexical decision has wide applicability and that the paradigm is currently used to study basic processes in word recognition, the nature of the mental lexicon, effects of word frequency, neighbor effects and various other phenomena of isolated word perception. Article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of this task. (54…

Proposes that an important role for connectionist research in language acquisition is analyzing what linguistic information is present in the child's input. Recent connectionist and statistical work analyzing the properties of real language corpora suggest a priori objections against the utility of distributional information are misguided. This…