Dissertation - Michael Becker

participants made a spurious vowel change in more than one trial (three from each group).The most common spurious changes were to [u], which is the vowel that [o] is must likelyto be misperceived as, with 12 trials changing [i] to [u] and 7 trials changing [o] to [u], fora total of 19 trials, or a mere 1.6% of the total number of trials.3.5.5.5 Summary of the experimental resultsIn conclusion, we see that Hebrew speakers responded to the two languages invery different ways:The “surface” language was significantly easier to generalize.Generalization scores in both languages were bi-modally distributed, with speakers whowere good generalizers and speakers who were bad generalizers. A significantly largerproportion of the speakers of the “surface” language were good generalizers relative to thespeakers of the “deep” language.Speakers of the “surface” language were equally successful in changing [i] to [o] and[o] to [i], while the “deep” language speakers were less successful with the [i] to [o] changerelative to the [o] to [i] change. In both groups, speakers perceived stem vowels correctlyin the vast majority of the time, as evidenced by the small number of trials with spuriousvowel changes. The influence of real Hebrew on the artificial languages was seen in thebias that speakers had towards selection of [-im].3.6 Discussion and analysisThe experimental results show that in selecting plural allomorphs in Hebrew, speakersmake their decisions based on the surface form of plural nouns, not based on theirunderlying form or their singular form. This section shows how the greater success of the“surface” language participants follows naturally from the Optimality Theoretic analysis Ioffered for Hebrew in §3.4.131