Abstract

A connectionist architecture comprised of cell assemblies was developed and applied to the problem of speech perception at the phonemic and lexical levels. The problem addressed involved a disagreement amongst theorists over the possible sources of lexical priming effects. Speech was encoded in the model as the temporal activity of phoneme units that are connected to higher-level word assemblies. The lexical layer was topographically organized based upon similarity of phonemic structure. Lateral inhibition at the lexical level was shown to be both necessary and sufficient to support results from phonological priming experiments involving human participants.

Citations