Learning Inflection by Itself

The paper reports on a few experimental results of a computer simulation of learning the verb morphology of Italian, English and Arabic with the same type of neural architecture based on Kohonen's self-organizing maps. Issues of the mental organization of the resulting morphological lexica are explored in some detail and discussed in the light of the differential distribution of regular and irregular inflections in the three languages. It is shown that typologically diverse, non trivial aspects of the underlying paradigmatic structure of the three verb systems effectively emerge through sheer exposure to realistic distributions of verb forms devoid of morpho-syntactic content. We argue that these results go a long way towards explaining how global organization effects in the mental morphological lexicon may eventually result from local word processing steps.