Dissertation - Michael Becker

ode) to form the past tense of novel verbs, regardless of the vowel in the present tense. Inreal English, only the four vowels [aI, eI, i:, u:] change to [o] in the past 24 , but speakersidentify [o] as a good marker of the past tense with little regard for what the present tensevowel is, and extend the use of [o] to unattested vowel mappings (while still preferringmappings that resemble existing mappings). Albright & Hayes (2003) point out that amodel of human behavior must include the ability to state generalizations about derivedforms separately from the bases they are derived from. I claim that the use of markednessconstraints, as proposed here, is suitable for doing just that.3.6.5 The role of the grammar of real HebrewThe participants’ responses in the experiment make it clear that they identified the pluralaffixes of the artificial language with the plural affixes of actual Hebrew. All the pluralforms that participants produced contained a well-formed plural affix, either –im or –ot 25 .Furthermore, speakers were quite successful at recognizing that the choice of affix dependson the vowels of the root, but except for one speaker, they never selected the vowels of theplural suffix independently of its consonants, but rather treated them as two whole units,–im and –ot, just like in real Hebrew.Whenever the participants produced plural forms, either repeating forms they haveheard or generating plurals that they haven’t heard, they pronounced them all with finalstress without fail.This indicates that the nouns of the artificial languages were notaccepted as just any nouns of Hebrew, but more specifically as native nouns of Hebrew.24 Examples: drive ∼ drove, break ∼ broke, freeze ∼ froze, and choose ∼ chose.25 A single participant offered the following four paradigms: amov ∼ amivit, agiv ∼ agivit, atox ∼ atixit,and aSoc ∼ axiSoc. The rest of this participant’s responses were unremarkable, with either –im or –ot in them.140