Modularity in a Connectionist Model of Morphology Acquisition

This paper describes a modular connectionist model of the acquisition of receptive inflectional morphology. The model takes inputs in the form of phones one at a time and outputs the associated roots and inflections. In its simplest version, the network consists of separate simple recurrent subnetworks for root and inflection identification; both networks take the phone sequence as inputs. It is shown that the performance of the two separate modular networks is superior to a single network responsible for both root and inflection identification. In a more elaborate version of the model, the network learns to use separate hidden-layer modules to solve the separate tasks of root and inflection identification.