A little help with the trace program. To compile: make To run: trace -p pfile -l lexfile where pfile is a parameter file and lexfile is a lexicon file. The program should be run on a regular terminal or in a terminal-emulator window. Two parameter files are provided: params -- these are the basic parameters used in McC&Elman, 1986 copars -- parameters used for categorical perception simulations in the above article; used with cptrace, see below. One lexicon file is provided: slex -- this is the lexicon described in McC&Elman. Different definitions of some phonemes were used in the trading relations and categorical perception simulations. A different version of the program must be comstructed for these, called cptrace. To compile: make cptrace it takes the -p and -l arguments, also. [cptrace differs from trace in using a different set of phoneme declarations. The standard versio of this stuff is in gfv.c; for cptrace, it is in cpfv.c] Once the program is running, if you type ? you will see a list of possible commands. Some are self-explanatory. Some of those that may not be or are very important are: test: prompts for a string of phonemes to test, resets all activations to resting levels, and executes nreps processing cycles. cycle: continues processing for nreps more cycles. pfreq: determines the frequency in cycles of redisplay of activations at phoneme and word levels. Prompts with "change? " Enter 'n' or a new value. nreps: determines the number of cycles executed when the test or cycle commands are entered. alpha: displays excitation parameters with labels. Prompts with "change? " Enter the label then the new value for each one you wish to change. gamma: displays inhibition parameters also with labels. finput: reads commands from a file, prompts for file name. commands that begin with s are often commands that save things in a file. Some of the commands are not used, such as grace, coart. Many of the commands have to do with saving files for producing figures like those in McC&Elman, for use by the leroy program; these probably will not be of use to you since you probably do not have leroy. NOTES: only the following phonemes are defined: pbtdkgsSrlaiu^ - means one phoneme's worth of silence. This can be changed, but requires making up feature codes for additional phonemes and defining them in a new version of the file gfv.c, also adding them to the list of "phonchars" and redefining a few things to take the changes into account. All the stuff that needs to be changed is in the files "defs.h" and "gfv.c" The model can take word frequency into account, but we have not explored this. The command freqscale is used to scale log frequencies and add to the resting level of word units. Use a small value (e.g., .0005) and use the rest command to set the word level resting level to about -.06. With this, the resting level of all word units will be scaled between -.06 and about -.01. To compress the range, use a smaller freqscale value (.0002) and higher resting level (-.03). You should make sure that rest + 11*freqscale is less than 0, since the log frequency of the highest frequency word is about 11. You can also prime particular words using the topdown command -- it takes a list of word, prime pairs followed by 'q' The display is somewhat hard to read. It presents the word and phoneme activations, words above phonemes. It is not true to life, in that actavations top out on the display before they really do internally. You can get separate displays of the word and phoneme activations using the wordacts and phonacts commands. Let me know if you have any problems!! -- jlm@cnbc.cmu.edu