Dissertation - Michael Becker

the identity of the final stop were used in assessing similarity, but the quality of the noun’slast vowel was ignored.The notion of similarity that humans use, then, is biased to notice some aspects ofphonological structure and ignore others.I claimed that it is not a coincidence thatuniversally, vowel quality never affects the voicing of a neighboring consonant, butrather that this is due to Universal Grammar.Since Universal Grammar doesn’t havea mechanism that correlates vowel quality with obstruent voicing, this correlation isabsent both from regular phonological processes cross-linguistically and from irregularphonological patterns of exceptionality in individual languages. In Optimality Theory, theobserved array of phonological processes follows from the structure of CON, the set ofuniversal constraints. By deriving irregular patterns of exceptions from this same set ofconstraints, the generalization about the natural patterning of exceptions is predicted.In Hebrew, the plural marker on nouns has two allomorphs, –im and –ot. While insome contexts the choice of allomorph is morphological, with –im being masculine and–ot feminine, the choice is also phonological. Masculine nouns with [o] in their stem aremore likely to select –ot than masculine nouns that don’t have [o]. This irregular patternwas captured in OT in terms of lexically-specific rankings of markedness constraints. Sincemarkedness constraints assess output forms only, the OT account predicted that the choiceof allomorph depends on the presence of [o] in the plural stem, without any regard to thevowels of the singular stem. Because nouns that have [o] in their plural stem also have [o]in their singular stem, Hebrew doesn’t offer speakers evidence about which stem matters,and speakers could learn Hebrew equally well by generalizing over vowels of plural stemsor over vowels of singular stems.To see which stem speakers look to in their generalizations, Hebrew speakers weretaught one of two languages in an artificial language experiment: One language paired –otwith plural stem [o], and another paired –ot with singular stem [o]. In both languages,vowel changes that are absent from real Hebrew restricted [o] to appear only in the singular221