Dissertation - Michael Becker

The problem here is that a single lexical item, alon, is “double-dipping”, i.e. its choiceof –ot is listed with clones of two constraints. The grammar the learner would make from(105) is in (106).(106) LOCAL(o) xalon ≫ DISTAL(o) olam ≫ φ-MATCH ≫LOCAL(o) alon , DISTAL(o) {alon, olar}While double-dipping doesn’t prevent the learner from successfully learning the realnouns of Hebrew, it makes the wrong prediction about speakers’ ability to project lexicalstatistics onto novel words. If DISTAL(o) has one clone that lists ot-takers that have a nonfinal[o], and another clone that lists all of the im-takers that have an [o] anywhere in theroot, as in (106), speakers will underestimate the ability of non-final [o] to correlate withthe selection of [o]. In the lexicon, 12 out of the 102 nouns that have the vowel pattern [a-o]are ot-takers, which makes their likelihood in the lexicon 11.8% (see 76 above). If these 12ot-takers are weighed against all the im-takers that have an [o] in them, as in (106), theirlikelihood in the grammar would only be 5.2%. This goes contrary to the observation in§3.3 that speakers correctly reproduce the relative strength of lexical trends.To prevent double-dipping, it is not enough to simply clone the most specific constraintavailable. The learner must also ignore (or “mask”) the matching W’s and L’s that areassigned by less-specific constraints once a more specific constraint is cloned. This isshown in (107), where the speaker cloned the most specific LOCAL(o) and also maskedW’s and L’s that were assigned to items that are associated with the new clones.106