The naturalness of product-oriented generalizations

Michael Becker and Lena Fainleib

article (pdf) | abstract | materials and results | contact info

Article (pdf)

Becker, Michael and Lena Fainleib (2009) The naturalness of product-oriented generalizations. Ms. UMass Amherst. Also available as ROA-1036.

An older version of this work can be found in chapter 3 of the first author's dissertation. Additionally, work that led to this paper was presnted at UCLA (handout), NYU (handout), Reed College (handout), UT Austin (handout), University of Tromsø (handout), Ben Gurion University (handout), 83rd LSA in San Francisco (handout), 82nd LSA in Chicago (handout), Workshop on Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology, Stanford (poster, handout), and IATL 23, Tel Aviv (handout).

Abstract

Allomorph selection by markedness constraints, which assess outputs only, is standard practice in Optimality Theory (Mester 1994 and onwards). This practice predicts that allomorph selection will be sensitive only to properties of the affixed output form; i.e. allomorph selection is product-oriented (Bybee & Slobin 1982, Albright & Hayes 2003). We present evidence from an artificial language experiment, showing that speakers are biased to prefer product-oriented generalizations.

Our language is based on Hebrew, where the plural affix [-ot] is preferred over [-im] when the stem contains [o]. In real Hebrew, all plural stems with [o] also have an [o] in the singular stem. In an experiment where [o] was present only in the singular or only in the plural, participants preferred pairing the allomorph [-ot] with the plural stem [o], showing a bias for a product-oriented generalization in the absence of positive evidence for it from real Hebrew.

Materials and results

Stimuli: sound files, pictures. These may be used freely; please acknowledge if used in publication.

Experimental results (comma-separated text files): plural generation trials, memorization scores by participant. Accompanying R scripts available upon request.

Contact info

Michael Becker, michael.becker@phonologist.org
Lena Fainleib, fainleib@post.tau.ac.il