Neural networks which act as state machines are applied to a variety of natural language tasks. Both generation of sequences and recognition are considered. Among the generation tasks are descriptions and planning. The recognition tasks include question answering, pronoun reference, action identification, and analogy completion. Overall, these studies introduce the use of connectionist state machines as intelligent agents in which the emphasis is on perception of and interaction with their environment through language; thus the agents are termed connectionist language users (CLUES).