Dissertation - Michael Becker

generally don’t alternate, regardless of the place of articulation of their final stop. Polysyllabicnouns usually do alternate if they are p-final or Ù -final, but not if they are t-final.Speakers have replicated this pattern of differential treatment of poly-syllabic nouns. Instatistical terms, the size and place effects have a significant interaction, and the implicationfor the learner is that the proportion of alternating nouns is learned separately in each placesizecombination.The proposed account of this size effect relies on the position of the alternating final stoprelative to the initial syllable of the root. In a mono-syllabic noun, the unfaithful mappingfrom a voiceless stop to a voiced one affects the initial syllable of the base, while a voicingalternation in a poly-syllablic noun doesn’t affect the initial syllable.Initial syllablesare known to enjoy greater faithfulness cross-linguistically, as formalized by Beckman(1997). The availability of a faithfulness constraint that protects only mono-syllabic rootsallows the speaker to partition the lexicon along this dimension, putting mono-syllables inone partition, and leaving the other nouns, which are therefore poly-syllabic, in anotherpartition.The role of the word-initial syllable in the distribution of voice in Turkish is not limitedto voicing alternations. Generally in the language, a coda stop followed by an onset stopwill surface with the voicing feature of the onset stop (also known as regressive voicingassimilation, e.g. is.tib.dat ‘despotism’, *is.tip.dat), but a coda stop in the initial syllablemay surface with its independent voicing specification (e.g. mak.bul ‘accepted’, eb.kem‘mute’).For concreteness, this section focuses on learning the Ù -final nouns of Turkish withsimple codas. The relevant lexical counts are in (49).52