A Cross-linguistic Model of the Acquisition of Inflectional Morphology in English and Modern Greek

We present a connectionist model of a general system for producing inflected words. The Multiple Inflection Generator (MIG) combines elements of several previous models (e.g., association between phonological representations of stem and inflection form: Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; multiple inflections for a grammatical class: Hoeffner & McClelland, 1993; lexical-semantic input: Joanisse & Seidenberg, 1999; multiple grammatical classes: Plunkett & Juola, 1999). MIG assumes that the goal of the morphological component of the language system is to output a phonological form appropriate to the grammatical context in which the word appears. Our aim was to demonstrate that the model is able to capture developmental patterns in the acquisition of morphology in two different languages: one with a simple morphological system (English), and one characterized by rich morphology and absence of default forms (Modem Greek).