Connectionist approaches to generative phonology

While connectionist models are ubiquitous in psycholinguistic approaches to language processing, they are less well-known as generative models of grammar. This work surveys a body of literature in which connectionist models have been developed to address problems central to generative phonology. The focus is on explaining to the newcomer precisely how these models work, and in particular how they grapple with locality, gradience, opacity, and learnability in phonology. An understanding of connectionist phonology both gives a deeper understanding of past developments in phonological theory and a glimpse into its future.