Dissertation - Michael Becker

variation for Hebrew, and were not taken to be errors. On each trial, a successful vowelmapping was defined as a production of an [o] in the singular and an [i] in the plural stem,or vice versa 20 . A successful plural allomorph selection was defined as one that matchesthe intended generalization in the language the participant was taught, e.g. –ot for pluralsstems with [o] in the “surface” language. A trial was categorized as successful if it hada successful vowel mapping and a successful choice of plural affix. With 20 trials each,participants were assigned a generalization score on a scale of 0–20.3.5.5 ResultsAs expected, the “surface” language participants generalized the intended pattern betterthan the “deep” language participants. The table in (121) shows the proportion of trialswhere participants successfully changed a singular [o] to [i] and vice versa, and alsoselected the plural affix as expected in the language they were asked to learn. The “surface”group was equally successful in both conditions, whereas the “deep” group was worse atthe change from singular [i] to plural [o] than at the change from [o] to [i].(121) “Surface” language “Deep” language difference[o] → [i] 55% 42% 13%[i] → [o] 54% 34% 20%Total 54% 38% 16%This section presents four aspects of the experimental results: (a) The participants inthe “surface” language were more successful than the participants in the “deep” language,with a particular disadvantage for the “deep” group in the change from [i] to [o], shownin §3.5.5.1, (b) The two groups did not have significantly different memorization scores,and these scores correlate with the generalization scores only in the “deep” group, shown20 The term “success” is used here in its statistical sense, which is judgement neutral, and simply refers toone of two possible outcomes in a binomial experiment. In this sense, a heart-attack can also be defined as asuccess.121