Academic Paper |
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| Title: | Learning Lexical Indexation |
| Author: | Andries W. Coetzee |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | http://www.umich.edu/~coetzee |
| Institution: | University of Michigan |
| Linguistic Field: | Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics |
| Abstract: | Morphological concatenation often triggers phonological processes. For instance, addition of the plural suffix /-ən/ to Dutch nouns causes vowel lengthening in some nouns due to the stress-to-weight principle ([xɑt] vs. [ˈxaː.tən] ‘hole’). These kinds of processes often apply only to a subset of words – not all Dutch nouns undergo this process ([kɑt] vs. [ˈkɑ.tən] ‘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 hypothesise 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 & Tesar ). |
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This article appears in Phonology Vol. 26, Issue 1, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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