Dissertation - Michael Becker

ackness of final stem vowels are also good predictors in combination with place: Highvowels promote the alternation of coronals, and back vowels promote the alternation ofpalatals. All of these generalizations were confirmed to be highly statistically significantin a logistic regression model. In other words, the size of nouns, the place of their finalstop, and the height and backness of their final vowels all strongly correlate with voicingalternations in a way that is statistically unlikely to be accidental.2.3 Speakers’ knowledge of the lexiconIn the previous section, the distribution of voicing alternations in the Turkish lexiconwas examined and shown to be rather skewed. The distribution of alternating and nonalternatingnoun-final stops is not uniform relative to other phonological properties thatnouns have: Size, place, height and backness were identified as statistically powerfulpredictors of alternation.What the humans who are native speakers of Turkish know about the distribution ofvoicing alternations, however, is a separate question, which is taken on in this section. Itwill turn out that native speakers identify generalizations about the distribution of voicingalternations relative to the size of nouns and the place of articulation of their final stops.However, speakers ignore, or fail to reproduce, correlations between the voicing of finalstops and the quality of the vowels that precede them.A novel word task (Berko 1958) was used to find out which statistical generalizationsnative speakers extract from their lexicon.This kind of task has been shown to elicitresponses that, when averaged over several speakers, replicate distributional facts aboutthe lexicon (e.g. Zuraw 2000 and many others).32