Directionality Effects and Exceptions in Learning Phonological Alternations

The present study explores learning vowel harmony with exceptions using the artificial language learning paradigm. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony pattern in which one affix (either prefix or suffix, depending on the condition) alternated between /me/ and /mo/ depending on the phonetic feature of the stem vowels. In Experiment 1, participants were able to learn the behaviors of both alternating and non-alternating affixes, but were more likely to generalize to novel affixes for non-alternating items than alternating items. In Experiment 2, participants were exposed to training data that contained non-alternating affixes in prefix position while alternating affixes were all suffixes, or vice versa. Participants were able to extend the non-alternating affixes to the novel direction, suggesting that participants inferred a non-directional harmony pattern. Overall, the patterns of alternating affixes are harder to learn than patterns of exceptions that do not alternate, which aligns with previous findings supporting a non-alternation bias. Our study raises the question of how biases towards exceptionality and directionality interact in phonological learning

Spanish epenthesis: Formal and performance perspectives

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Speakers’ knowledge of alternations is asymmetrical: Evidence from Seoul Korean verb paradigms

This paper investigates whether and how speakers track the relative frequency of different patterns of alternation in the lexicon, by investigating speakers' behavior when they are faced with unpredictability in allomorph selection. We conducted a wug test on Seoul Korean verb paradigms, testing whether speakers can generalize reliable lexical patterns. The test was performed in two directions. In forward formation test, the pre-vocalic base and pre-consonantal non-base forms were the stimulus and response, respectively, whereas in backward formation test, the stimulus-response relation was switched. The results show patterns approximating statistical patterns in Seoul Korean verb lexicon, thus confirming the lexical frequency matching reported in many previous studies. However, contrary to the conventional assumption, the results of the backward formation test are consistent with lexical frequencies relevant for the forward formation, not backward formation. This observed asymmetry is broadly consistent with the single base hypothesis (Albright 2002a, b, 2005, 2008), in which forward, as opposed to backward formation rules play a privileged role in speakers' morphological grammar. KEYWORDS: allomorph selection, alternation, Seoul Korean, single base hypothesis, wug tes

Mispronounced lexical items in polish English of advanced learners

The present study is a report on an experiment in which 20 English Department students, all advanced learners of English, were recorded having been asked to read a list of diagnostic sentences containing 80 words known to be problematic for Poles in terms of their pronunciation. This has been done in order to isolate and examine the major error types, to establish a hierarchy of difficulty among 8 sources of pronunciation errors, to compare the obtained results with the most common error types made by intermediate learners and to juxtapose the participants’ subjective evaluation of the phonetic difficulty of words with their actual phonetic performance. The final goal is to draw pedagogical implications for the phonetic training of advanced students of English

Polish yers revisited

It is common in linguistic research to attempt a unified analysis for similar patterns in related languages. In this paper, I argue that to do so for Polish and Russian vowel alternations would be a mistake. Although they share some notable phonological properties, they differ in their prevalence and their extensibility. I present an account of Polish under which vowel alternations are unexceptional, and exceptional blocking of alternation is achieved with lexically indexed constraints. This is the complement of Gouskova's (2012) account of Russian, which I argue to be desirable on the basis of novel corpus statistics from the Polish lexicon and their divergences from the trends for analogous words in Russian.En la investigació lingüística és corrent buscar una anàlisi unificada per a fenòmes similars de llengües relacionades. En aquest treball, s'argumenta que fer-ho per a les alternaces vocàliques del polonès i del rus seria un error. Encara que comparteixen propietats fonològiques notables, difereixen respecte a la seva prevalència i la seva extensibilitat. Es presenta una anàlisi del polonès en la qual les alternances vocàliques no són excepcionals i el blocatge excepcional de les alternances s'assoleix amb restriccions indexades lèxicament. Aquesta és una anàlisi complementària de la de Gouskova (2012) per al rus, que s'argumenta que és desitjable sobre la base d'una nova exploració estadística d'un corpus del lexicó polonès i les seves divergències respecte a les tendències per a mots anàlegs en rus

Variation and change in Italian phonology: On the mutual dependence of grammar and lexicon in Optimality Theory

In this paper I discuss the influence of language acquisition and borrowing on the reorganisation of grammar and lexicon in the development from Latin into Italian. We will have a look at the historical sequencing of the introduction of new phonological processes, velar palatalization, mid vowel breaking, and lateral palatalization, and how they conspire to create new contrasts or reintroduce contrasts that have been subject to neutralisation. The amphichronic analysis proposed here brings together insights from acquisition and loanword phonology in Optimality Theory to explain the historical development

The effect of phonotactics on alternation learning

This study investigates whether alternation learning is facilitated by a matching phonotactic generalization. In a series of artificial grammar learning experiments, English learners were trained on artificial languages evincing categorical vowel harmony alternations across morpheme boundaries. These languages differed in the degree of harmony within stems (disharmonic, semiharmonic, and harmonic), and thus the degree of phonotactic support for the alternation. Results indicate that alternation learning was best when supported by matching stem phonotactics (harmonic language; experiment 1). Learners, however, were reluctant to extend a learned phonotactic constraint to novel unseen alternations (experiments 2 and 3). Taken together, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that alternation learning is facilitated by a matching static phonotactic generalization, but that learners are conservative in positing alternations in the absence of overt evidence for them.

Rule-governed allomorphy can be suppletive also

Commonly occurring linguistic forms, including allomorphs, tend to be learned (listed in speakers\u27 mental lexicons) even if they are formed according to the pattern of a linguistic rule. They thus have dual motivation: the motivation given by the rule, and the suppletive motivation of their having been learned. This accounts for the otherwise inexplicable persistence of rule-governed allomorphy when the conditioning environment is destroyed through diachronic change, producing apparent positive exceptions to the rule

Learning a morphological system without a default: the Polish genitive

The acquisition of the English past tense inflection is the paradigm example of rule learning in the child language literature and has become something of a test case for theories of language development. This is unfortunate, as the idiosyncratic properties of the English system of marking tense make it a rather unrepresentative example of morphological development. In this paper, I contrast this familiar inflection with a much more complex morphological subsystem, the Polish genitive. The genitive case has three different markers, each restricted to a different subset of nouns, in both the singular and the plural. Analysis of the spontanous speech of three children between the ages of 1;4 and 4;11 showed that they generalized, and overgeneralized, all three singular endings. However, error rates were extremely low and there is no evidence that they treated any one ending as the ‘default’. The genitive plural, on the other hand, showed a strikingly different pattern of acquisition, similar to that seen in English-speaking children learning the past tense. It is argued that in the latter two cases, the default-like character of one of the affixes is attributable to the properties of the relevant inflectional subsystems, not to the predispositions that children bring to the language-learning task