Connectionism and French gender attribution: Sokolik and Smith re-visited

Sokolik and Smith (1992) report on a connectionist model of the acquisition of French gender attribution which has been widely reported to have shown that such models are 'capable of learning the gender of a large set of French nouns'. These claims are examined by reference to various results gained through a number of extensions to their network model. These results suggest a degree of caution in accepting Sokolik and Smith's conclusions. Further discussion suggests that the search for a computational account of gender attribution is, perhaps, misguided.