Dissertation - Michael Becker

Participants were told that they would learn a made-up language that is a new kind ofHebrew, and that it is written in Hebrew letters and pronounced with an Israeli accent. Theywere asked to memorize the words of the new language and try to figure out the regularity 18of the language.The experiment was conducted as follows: training and testing on singulars (tworounds), training and testing on singulars and plurals (three rounds), plural generation forten new nouns, testing on the singulars and plurals from the training phase, and pluralgeneration for 10 additional new nouns. These phases are described more fully below.Training started with singulars only: A picture of an object was displayed on the screen,and a sentence below it introduced the object as a masculine noun, by displaying the textin (116).(116) Here’s a nice MASChinenexmad MASCIn parallel, the name of the object was played. The participant pressed a key to go to thenext item. All 10 items were thus introduced in a random order, and then introduced againin a new random order. After each item was introduced twice, participants were tested onthem. A picture of an item was displayed, along with the instructions in (117).(117) Say in a clear voice, “this is a nice MASC ”, or “I don’t remember”imru be-kol ram ve-barur, “zenexmad MASC ”, o “ani lo zoxer/et”The whole procedure of training and testing was then repeated. Note that at this point,all participants were trained on the same materials, regardless of whether they were goingto learn the “surface” language or the “deep” language.After two rounds of training and testing on singulars, plurals were introduced. A pictureof a pair of objects, e.g. two apples, was displayed, with the text in (118).18 The Hebrew word used was xukiyút, which depending on context, can mean ‘legality’, ‘wellformedness’,‘regularity’, ‘pattern’, etc.117