Rules, Analogy and Social Factors codetermine past-tense formation patterns in English

We investigate past-tense formation preferences for five irregular English verb classes. We gathered data on a large scale using a nonce probe study implemented on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We compare a Minimal Generalization Learner (which infers stochastic rules) with a Generalized Context Model (which evaluates new items via analogy with existing items) as models of participant choices. Overall, the GCM is a better predictor, but the the MGL provides some additional predictive power. Because variation across speakers is greater than variation across items, we also explore individual-level factors as predictors. Females exhibited significantly more categorical choices than males, a finding that can be related to results in sociolinguistics

Morphological Doublets in Croatian: A multi-methodological analysis

The term morphological doubletism refers to a situation in language when there are two (or more) morphemes available for a single cell in an inflectional paradigm of a lexeme. Slavonic languages, with their rich inflectional systems, show particularly high levels of doubletism. In the present dissertation we analyse examples of doubletism in Croatian nominal paradigms. As shown by the dissertation’s subtitle, “a multi-methodological analysis”, we compare and contrast evidence obtained by various methods. First we conduct a corpus study to determine the frequency distributions of the doublet pairs in present-day Croatian. This analysis has shown that the distribution of the doublet pairs is not determined by any intra- or extra-linguistic factor, but that it is not completely random either. These distributions are later used in several additional studies, the purpose of which is to answer the question of how such forms are processed in speakers’ mental grammars. One of the analyses is a computational one, in which we try to reproduce a grammar of a Croatian speaker by using two memory based models (AM and TiMBL). The models were highly successful in producing the desired output without resorting to any rules or generalizations. We also report the results of three questionnaire studies, all of which show that native speakers are extremely sensitive to the language input they receive, in line with usage-based theories of language, as well as that mental grammars are gradient. The speakers’ ratings and production rates closely matched the proportions of the doublet pairs in the corpus. Furthermore, speakers distinguish between several levels of domination of one ending over another. When the domination of one form is weak, speakers resort to a different decision criterion, namely they look at the dominant ending of phonologically similar words