The Production of Finnish Nouns: A Psycholinguistically Motivated Connectionist Model

Abstract

Connectionist modelling is a relatively new and valuable technique for the development of language processing theories. Most of language production models thus far have been discussed with respect to the English language. In this study, we present an interactive activation model of noun production for a morphologically complex language, viz. Finnish. Our model follows the psycholinguistic assumptions of the SAID model, an experimentally corroborated production model. The present model is a local connectionist model and it has been evaluated by computer simulation. It has been tested with respect to case and possessive suffixes of nouns. Furthermore, to test the psycholinguistic plausibility of the model, simulations of the most robust phonological frame constraint in speech errors, the initialness effect, were performed. These simulations showed good correspondence to empirical error data. We argue that the present model provides a basis for further computational research in morphologically rich languages like Finnish.