Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We describe a connectionist model of the past tense that generates both regular and irregular past tense forms with good generalization. The model also exhibits frequency effects that have been taken as evidence for a past tense rule (Pinker, 1991) and consistency effects that are not predicted by rule-based accounts. Although not a complete account of the past tense, this work suggests that connectionist models may Capture generalizations about linguistic phenomena that rule-based accounts miss.