Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

e present a new distributed connectionist model of the perception of spoken words. The model employs an internal representation of speech that combines lexical information with abstract phonological information. W e show how a single distributed representation of this type can form the basis for the perception of words and nonwords alike. The model is tested against lexical and phonetic decision data from Marslen-Wilson and Warren (1994). These experiments examined the integration of cues to place of articulation diuing lexical access and showed a pattern of results which proved difficult to accommodate in previous models. The use of a single, late, phonological representation allows this pattern of results to be simulated and has the potential to incorporate many other properties of the human system.