Modeling form similarity in the mental lexicon with self-organizing feature maps

This paper describes recent efforts to model the remarkable ability of humans to recognize speech and words. Different techniques for representing phonological similarity between words in the lexicon with self-organizing algorithms are discussed. Simulations using the Standard Kohonen algorithm are presented to illustrate some problems confronted with this technique in modeling similarity relations of form in the human mental lexicon. Alternative approaches that can potentially deal with some of these limitations are sketched