Dissertation - Michael Becker

To test whether the selection of the plural affix is sensitive to the vowels of the inputor the vowels of the output, I created a pair of artificial languages, where a singular [i]alternates with a plural [o] and vice versa. In one language, the selection of –ot correlatedwith the presence of [o] in the plural stem, and in the other language, the selection of–ot correlated with the presence of [o] in the singular stem.As predicted, speakerswere significantly more successful at generalizing the language where the selection of –ot correlated with the presence of [o] in the plural stem.The artificial languages were designed and presented as languages that are just like realHebrew, with the only difference being the vowel changes from [o] to [i] and vice versa,which don’t occur in real Hebrew. To insure that singulars and plurals are correctly paired,participants never heard or produced a plural form without hearing or producing its singularin the same trial. Indeed, the experimental results show that the participants accepted theartificial nouns as native nouns of Hebrew, evidenced by their generation of plural formswith final stress and a bias towards –im.The prediction of the markedness-based analysis, which favors the language that pairs–ot with plural [o]’s, was contrasted with an MGL-based analysis (Albright & Hayes2003), which predicts that the two languages would be equally different from Hebrew, andthus equally difficult for Hebrew speakers. The point is applicable more generally to anyanalysis that relies on general pattern-finding mechanisms that don’t have any expectationsabout what a possible human language is. Since the two artificial languages are formallyequally complex, with the exact same amount of information in them, there is no a priorireason to prefer generalizations about output forms over generalizations about input forms.Additionally, I have shown that the experimental results cannot be reduced to a merephonotactic preference, since the phonotactics of real Hebrew prefer the pairing of nonidenticalvowels over identical vowels.In real Hebrew, the connection between [o] in the stem and the selection of –ot isequally reliable when stated over singulars or over plurals: One can say that singulars with143