<OT> New Posting: ROA-1001

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 1001-1108

The Surfeit of the Stimulus: Analytic biases filter lexical statistics in Turkish devoicing neutralization

Michael Becker <michael at linguist.umass.edu>
Nihan Ketrez <nihan.ketrez at yale.edu>
Andrew Nevins <nevins at fas.harvard.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1001


Abstract:
Some sublexical statistical regularities of Turkish phonotactics
are productively extended in nonce words, while others are
not. In particular, while stop-voicing alternation rates
in the lexicon can be predicted by the place of articulation
of the stem-final stop, by word-length, and by the preceding
vowel quality, this stop-voicing alternation is only productively
conditioned by place of articulation and word-length. Speakers'
responses in forced-choice and production tasks demonstrate
that although they are attuned to the place of articulation
and size effects, they ignore preceding vowels, even though
the lexicon contains this information in abundance. We interpret
this finding as evidence that speakers distinguish between
phonologically-motivated generalizations and accidental
generalizations. We propose that Universal Grammar, a set
of analytic biases, acts as a filter on the generalizations
that humans can make: UG contains information about possible
and impossible interactions between phonological elements.
Omnivorous statistical models that do not have information
about possible interactions incorrectly reproduce accidental
generalizations, thus failing to model speakers' behavior.

Comments: 
Keywords: Turkish, lexical trends, universal grammar, constraint cloning, voicing alternations
Areas: Phonology,Morphology
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1001