Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Lakoff's new theory of cognitive phonology appears to be free of the rule ordering constraints that make generative rules computationally awkward. It uses a multilevel representation for utterances, to which multiple rules may apply in parallel. This paper presents the first implementation of Lakoff's proposal, based on a novel "many maps" architecture. The architecture may also explain certain constraints on phonological rules that are not adequately accounted for by more abstract models.