Connection science in a new information-processing paradigm which attempts to imitate the architecture and process of the brain, and brings together researchers from disciplines as diverse as computer science, physics, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, biology, engineering, neuroscience and AI. Work in Connectionist natural language processing (CNLP) is now expanding rapidly, yet much of the work is still only available in journals. To make this research more accessible, this work brings together an important and comprehensive set of articles from the journal Connection Science, which represent the state of the art in Connectionist natural language processing, from speech recognition to discourse comprehension. While it is quintessentially Connectionist, it also deals with hybrid systems, and should be of interest to both theoreticians as well as computer modellers.