Dissertation - Michael Becker

faithfully. The participants saw an overt possessor with genitive case followed by a blank,to provide the syntactic context for a possessive suffix, e.g. Ali’nin“Ali’s”, and they heard two possible possessed forms, e.g. fet-i and fed-i. Speakerspressed “F” or “J” to choose the first or the second possessive form they heard. Mostspeakers took 15-20 minutes to complete the experiment.The order of the stimuli and the order of the choices were randomized. Additionally,the fillers were randomly distributed among the first three quarters of the stimuli.2.3.2 ResultsThe experimental results are plotted in (31), grouped by size and place, plotted againstthe percent of alternating words in the lexicon with the matching size and place. Thecorrelation is excellent (Spearman’s rank correlation test, S = 46, ρ = .839, p < .005),showing that speakers have accurately matched the percentages of alternating words in thelexicon. On average, the proportion of alternating responses ranges from 30% to 82%, asopposed to a wider range of 6% to 92% in the lexicon. Nevertheless, this compressed rangeof responses 6 correlates with the lexicon very well.6 The source of the compression of the human results comes both from between-speaker and withinspeakersources. Some participants showed a strong preference for alternating responses, and some showedthe opposite preference, resulting in at least 3 and at most 22 alternating responses per item, thus coveringonly 79% of the range of 0 to 24 alternating responses possible with 24 participants. Additionally, individualparticipants varied as to how strong the size and place effects were in their responses, with weak-effectparticipants causing further compression. The strength of these effects did not correlate with participants’overall preference for alternation or non-alternation.36