Exploiting Syllable Structure in a Connectionist Phonology Model

In a previous paper (Touretzky & Wheeler, 1990a) we showed how adding a clustering operation to a connectionist phonology model produced a parallel processing accountof certain "iterative" phenomena. In this paper we show how the addition of a second structuring primitive, syllabification, greatly increases the power of the model. We present examples from a non-Indo-European language that appear to require rule ordering to at least a depth of four. By adding syllabification circuitryto structure the model's perception of the input string, we are able to handle these examples with only two derivational steps. We conclude that in phonology, derivation can be largely replaced by structuring.