Learning lexical indexation

Abstract

Abstract. Morphological concatenation often triggers phonological processes. For instance, addition of the plural suffix /-ǝn/ to Dutch nouns causes vowel lengthening in some nouns due to the weight-to-stress principle ([xɑt] vs. [xáː.tǝn] 'hole'). These kinds of processes often apply only to a subset of words -not all Dutch nouns undergo this process ([kɑt] vs. [kɑ.tǝn] 'cat'). Nouns need to be lexically indexed as either undergoing this process or not. I investigate how phonological grammar and lexical indexation are learned when learners are confronted with data like these. Based on learnability considerations, I hypothesize that learners acquire a grammar with default non-alternation, so that novel items are treated as non-alternating. I report the results of artificial language learning experiments compatible with this hypothesis, and model these results in a version of the Biased Constraint Demotion Algorithm (Prince and Tesar 2004).

Frequency biases in phonological variation

“…A long tradition of typological research has established strong universal patterns across languages, a result that could be interpreted as favoring a system that includes a strong Universal Grammar. Recent research in artificial grammar learning has also shown that linguistic patterns that counter such universal trends are either unlearnable or at least not easily learnable (Carpenter 2006(Carpenter , 2010Coetzee 2009b;Moreton 2008;Pater and Tessier 2006). On the other hand, there are also unambiguous examples of languages with grammars that counter universal trends (Coetzee and Pretorius 2010;Hyman 2001), showing that it should be possible for language learners to acquire grammars that do not fit neatly into the limits of Universal Grammar.…”

Speakers’ knowledge of alternations is asymmetrical: Evidence from Seoul Korean verb paradigms

“…One straightforward and uninteresting possibility is random guessing; this predicts that speakers should simply assign equal probability to all possible patterns. Alternatively, speakers might choose the response that best satisfies paradigm uniformity constraints (Kenstowicz 1995(Kenstowicz , 1996Benua 1997;Steriade 2000;Coetzee 2009). If speakers were found to mirror lexical statistics in the forward direction, while employing random guessing or favoring uniformity only in the backward formation direction, this would also support an asymmetrical model such as the single base hypothesis.…”

Reduplication in Hawaiian: variations on a theme of minimal word

“…Surgery on ℜ works in tandem with standard ranking algorithms, like recursive constraint demotion (Tesar 2004), to learn exceptions (see Alderete (2008) for an illustration). Alternative conceptions of learning exceptions, like the Constraint Coindexing models of Pater (2009a) and Coetzee (2009), do not have a parsimonious relationship with OT learning protocols because they introduce a constraint selection problem. 6 Constraint Coindexing learns exceptional patterns by cloning constraints (either markedness or faithfulness constraints) and then associating them with specific material of the lexical entry via an index.…”