Dissertation - Michael Becker

location. Whether speakers replicate the lexical trend of the [o]’s location is a matter forfurther experimentation.The vowel effect in the experiment was only detected reliably when the similarity of thetest items to actual ot-takers was taken into account - specifically, what mattered most wasthe similarity of the final syllable. In designing the stimuli in (83), I made sure that overallthey didn’t resemble real native nouns of Hebrew too closely. An impressionistic inspectionof the results in (83), however, lead me to believe that novel nouns that share their finalsyllable with real ot-takers got a high rate of –ot responses, regardless of their vowel. Forexample, the novel noun cagág, which has no [o] in it, got more –ot responses than mostnouns that do have [o], and I attribute that to the existence of the real noun gág ∼ gag-ót‘roof’. The logistic regression model in (82) strongly confirmed this hypothesis. Othermeasures of similarity that were tested were shown to be either less useful or completelyinsignificant.Berent, Pinker & Shimron (1999, 2002) report a series of experiments similar to theone I present here. They gave participants novel nouns, presented orthographically, andasked the participants to write a plural form for them. The novel nouns were chosen soas to control for their similarity to real im-takers and ot-takers, and they found that novelnouns that are similar to existing ot-takers elicited a higher rate of choosing –ot.Berent et al. (1999, 2002) controlled for the degree of similarity of their novel itemsto actual items by consistently varying the number of changed features, but not by makingthe change in a consistent phonological position. They define three levels of similaritybetween novel items and real items: (a) “similar”, which involves changing one featureon one segment that is not a place feature – usually a change of [voice], lateral (r vs.l), or anterior (s vs. S), (b) “moderate”, which involves a bigger change of one segment –usually a change of place of articulation and some other feature, and (c) “dissimilar”, whichinvolves a change in all of the consonants of the root. In the majority of cases, the “similar”and “moderate” changes altered the second syllable of the root (69% of the stimuli in in89