Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Over the last 10 years, the assimilation process referred to as vowel harmony has served as a test case for a number of proposals in phonological theory. Current autosegmental approaches successfully capture the intuition that vowel harmony is a dynamic process involving the interaction of a sequence of vowels; still, no theoretical analysis has offered a non-stipulative account of the inconsistent behavior of the so-called "transparent", or disharmonic, segments. The current paper proposes a connectionist processing account of the vowel harmony phenomenon, using data from Hungarian. The strength of this account is that it demonstrates that the same general principle of assimilation which underiies the behavior of the "harmonic" forms accounts as well for the apparently exceptional "transparent" cases, without stipulation.