Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is well known that children generally exhibit a "U-shaped" pattern of development in the process of acquiring the past tense. Piunkett & Marchman (1991) showed that a connectionist network, trained on the past tense, would exhibit U-shaped learning effects. This network did not completely master the past tense mapping, however. Piunkett & Marchman (1993) showed that a network trained with an incrementally expanded training set was able to achieve acceptable levels of mastery, as well as show the desired U-shaped pattern. In this paper, we point out some problems with using an incrementally expanded training set. We propose a model of selective attention that enables our network to completely master the past tense mapping and exhibit U-shaped learning effects without requiring external manipulation of its training set.