Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Goldsmith (1990.1991) and Lakoff (in press) have both proposed phonological theories involving parallel constraint satisfaction, and making explicit reference to Smolensky's (1986) harmony theory. W e show here that the most straightforward implementation of phonological constraint satisfaction models as spin glasses does not work, due to the need for directionality in constraints. Imposing directionality negates some of the advantages hoped for from such a model. We have developed a neural network that implements a subset of the operations in the Goldsmith and Lakoff phonological theories, but proper behavior requires asymmetric connections and essentially feed-forward processing. After describing the architecture of this network w e will move on to the issue of whether spin glass models are really an appropriate metaphor for phonological systems.