The influence of morphological regularities on the dynamics of a connectionist network.

The effects of morphological regularities on the behavior of connectionist networks were studied by training identical networks on orthographic-semantic mappings that either contained such regularities or did not. Morphological regularities had a substantial impact on both the amount of training needed to learn a mapping and the number of words that could be included in the training set. A variety of analyses demonstrated how morphological regularities structure the organization and componentiality of a network's internal representations. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.