Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes a technique developed for modeling historical change in connectionist networks, and Wefly reviews previous work applying that technique to the problem of the historical development of the regular verb system from early to late Old English. W e then broaden the scope of the simulations and ask what the effect would be of having such changes occur in a single mechanism which is processing both the regular and inegular verbs, and extended over a longer time period. A s w e shall see, the results are highly consistent with the major historical developments. Furthermore, the results are readily under- stood in terms of network dynamics, and provide a ratio- nale for the shape of the attested historical changes.