language: en

Relating Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Morphology

Michael Gasser
Indiana University

Abstract Most theories of language processing and acquisition make the assumption that perception and comprehension are related to production, but few have anything say about how. This paper describes a performance-oriented connectionist model of the acquisition of morphology in which production builds on representations which develop during the learning of word recognition. Using artificial language stimuli embodying simple suffixation, prefixation, and template rules, I demonstrate that the model generalizes to novel combinations of roots and inflections for both word recognition and production. I argue that the capacity of connectionist networks to develop intermediate distributed representations which not only enable the solving of the task at hand but also facilitate another task offers a plausible account of how comprehension and production come to share phonological knowledge as words are learned.

Introduction