Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Across languages there are certain characteristics which they share. Linguists, trying to explain lan- guage universals, have c o m e up with different theo- ries: They argue for (1) the innateness of general linguistic principles, (2) the communicative func- tions reflected in linguistic structure, (3) the psy- chological d e m a n d s placed upon language users, or (4) grammar-internal explanations. This paper tries to explain s o m e of the morphological universals in the framework of a connectionist network, support- ing the third approach. Employing simple recurrent networks, a series of experiments were done on var- ious types of morphological rules. T h e results show that the model's performance mirrors the extent to which the different types of rules occur in natural languages. The paper explains how the model has discovered these universals.