Dissertation - Michael Becker

∼ morad-ót ‘slope’, gág ∼ gag-ót ‘roof’, sulám ∼ sulam-ót ‘ladder’, xaSáS ∼ xaSaS-ót‘worry’, nód ∼ nod-ót ‘flask’, nicóc ∼ nicoc-ót ‘spark’, and makór ∼ mekor-ót ‘source’.The other items were given a value of zero, since they did not share their final syllable withany known ot-taker.The addition of similar as a fixed-effect variable made a highly significant improvementto the model, as determined by an ANOVA model comparison (χ 2 (1) < .001). Not onlydid similar come out highly significant, it allowed the effect of vowel to emerge (82).The adequacy of this model was verified with the pvals.fnc function from the languageRpackage (Baayen 2008), which left the p-values essentially unchanged.(82) Estimate SE z p(Intercept) −1.3488 0.1357 −9.936 < 0.001a-o 0.4660 0.1577 2.954 0.003i-o 0.4977 0.1608 3.096 0.002o-a 0.4187 0.1652 2.534 0.011similar 0.8172 0.1698 4.814 < 0.001With [a-a] as the baseline, each of the three vowel patterns that have [o] in them cameout significantly more conducive to ot-responses than the baseline. An additional modelthat is identical to the one in (82) except for the specification of [o-a] as the baseline forvowel shows a significant difference between [a-a] and [o-a] (p = .011), but without asignificant difference between [o-a] and either of [a-o] or [i-o] (p > .1).Since the similarity of the final syllables of the novel items to the final syllablesof existing ot-takers was seen to make a significant improvement, four other similaritymeasures were tested: (a) the initial syllable (one or two segments), (b) the initial twosegments, (c) the initial three segments, and (d) the final two segments. Each of these fourmeasures was encoded as a binary variable, following the procedure described for similarabove. Then, each variable was added, one at a time, to the base model in (81). The first86