 Connectionists have made significant progress in demonstrating the power of neural networks to master cognitive tasks. Here are three well-known experiments that have encouraged connectionists to believe that neural networks are good models of human intelligence. One of the most attractive of these efforts is Sejnowski and Rosenberg’s 1987 work on a net that can read English text called NETtalk. The training set for NETtalk was a large data base consisting of English text coupled with its corresponding phonetic output, written in a code suitable for use with a speech synthesizer. Tapes of NETtalk’s performance at different stages of its training are very interesting listening. At first the output is random noise. Later, the net sounds like it is babbling, and later still as though it is speaking English double-talk (speech that is formed of sounds that resemble English words). At the end of training, NETtalk does a fairly good job of pronouncing the text given to it. Furthermore, this ability generalizes fairly well to text that was not presented in the training set.