Dissertation - Michael Becker

exad MASC mi-smol, vebeyaxad ele Sney MASC nexmadim MASC ”.haSlimu et ha-miSpat be-cura Se-tiSama laxem haxi matima la-ivrit ha-xadaSa Selamadetem.After the first round of plural generation, the ten nouns that speakers were trained andtested on appeared for another round of testing (no feedback was given at this point). Thiswas done to make the participants mentally review the material they learned, reconsider anypotentially unfruitful strategies, and hopefully make the next round of plural generationmore consistent with the artificial language. After this round of testing, the second andlast round of plural generation included the remaining ten nouns from (115), following thesame procedure as in the first round of plural generation.3.5.3 ParticipantsData from a total of 60 participants was used in this study, 21 students at the HebrewUniversity and 39 students at the Tel Aviv University. All were born in Israel and werenative speakers of Hebrew, without any self-reported hearing or vision difficulties. Therewere 24 males and 36 females, average age 23.4, age range 18–29 19 . For their time andeffort, participants were either paid 20 shekels (around US$6) or given course credit.Four additional participants were excluded: One participant misunderstood the task,and most of the time supplied the names of objects in actual Hebrew instead of their namesin the artificial language. Another participant failed to correctly repeat several of the namesfor novel items she had just heard, and performed badly on the other tasks, suggesting anunreported disorder of hearing or cognition. Two other participants were excluded becausethey did not produce any response for several items in the plural generation rounds.19 In pilots, participants over 30 were largely unable to perform minimal memorization, so 29 was chosenas a cut-off age for the current experiment.119