The representation of Hebrew words: Evidence from the obligatory contour principle

Berent, Iris; Shimron, Joseph

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(97)00016-4

Cited by 104 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…In order to obtain these, a forced-choice experiment was designed, in which nonce minimal pairs were presented to participants, who were then asked to indicate which of the pair sounded more like a possible word of English. This design was selected because while rating wordlikeness on a Likert scale does a good job of finding differences in rating between nonce words representing systematic vs. accidental gaps in the lexicon (Frisch and Zawaydeh 2001), forced-choice tasks have been shown to find these differences as well as more detailed differences (Berent and Shimron 1997, Daland et al 2011, Kager and Pater 2012. This is helpful, as speakers have been shown to accept nonce words gradiently, reflecting patterns in the distribution of the sound or morpheme in question in the language (Albright and Hayes 2003).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both Hebrew and Arabic speakers, for example, rate nonce words that represent OCP-violations (phonotactically illicit, and thus a systematic gap) far worse than nonce words that are phonotactically licit (accidental gaps) (Berent andShimron 1997, Frisch andZawaydeh 2001). Likewise, Amharic, Chala, and Quechua speakers make fewer mistakes when producing phonotactically licit nonce words than when producing phonotactically illicit ones (Rose andKing 2007, Gallagher 2013).…”

Section: Laxmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Tense” /æ/ is still lax: A phonotactics study

Duncan

2016

AMP

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The production of the lax vowel /æ/ is widely studied as a sociolinguistic variable in American English, as several dialects differ in the allophonic distribution of lax and tense variants of the vowel. Using a forced-choice well-formedness judgment task, this paper tests whether the /æ/ used by Northern Cities Shift (NCS) speakers, which is described as a raised and tensed [ɛə] in all environments, is still represented as a lax vowel in speakers’ grammars. Participants who were native speakers of California English, which only tenses preceding nasals, and NCS English, which tenses everywhere, were asked to choose which of a pair of nonce words, constructed to include a lax-only environment /Vsk, Vsp/, as in gasp, risk, sounds more like a possible English word. California English speakers significantly prefer frames containing lax vowels, including [æ], over those containing tense vowels. NCS speakers respond in the same way: they favor [ɛə] in trials like [bɛəsp] vs. [bisp] just as California English speakers favor [æ] in [bæsp] vs. [bisp]. This suggests they keep the vowel in the phonologically active class usually considered to be lax vowels, providing evidence that speakers generalize features based on lexical distributions rather than phonetic properties.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Laxmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Tense” /æ/ is still lax: A phonotactics study

Duncan

2016

AMP

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“…First, participants are typically unaware of the constraint on root structure and are unable to explain the unacceptabilityof words with rootinitial geminates (Berent & Shimron, 1997). Second, the findings obtained in rating and production replicate in online tasks.…”

Section: Phonological Constraints That Appeal To Variables: Evidence mentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The results of the rating studies strongly support the representation of the root. Root-initial gemination was rated significantly lower than either root-final gemination or no-gemination controls (Berent, Marcus, Shimron, & Gafos, in press;Berent & Shimron, 1997). Importantly, this finding emerged in each of the word classes, regardless of the location of geminates in the word.…”

Section: Phonological Constraints That Appeal To Variables: Evidence mentioning

confidence: 95%

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Can connectionist models of phonology assembly account for phonology?

Berent

2001

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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Connectionist models have gained considerable success as accounts of how printed words are named. Their success challenges the view of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) as rules. By extension, however, this challenge is sometimes interpreted also as evidence against linguistic rules and variables. This inference tacitly assumes that the generalizations inherent in reading (specifically, GPCs) are similar in their scope to linguistic generalizations and that they are each reducible to token associations. I examine this assumption by comparing the scope of generalizationsrequired for mapping graphemes to phonemes and several linguistic phonological generalizations. Marcus (1998b) distinguishes between two types of generalizations: those that fall within a model's training space and those that exceed it. The scope of generalizations is determined by the model's representational choicesspecifically, the implementation of operations over mental variables. An analysis of GPCs suggests that such generalizations do not appeal to variables; hence, they may not exceed the training space. Likewise, certain phonological regularities,such as syllable phonotactic constraints and place assimilation, may be captured by an associativeprocess. In contrast, other phonological processes appeal to variables; hence, such generalizations potentially exceed the training space. I discuss one such case, the obligatory contour principle. I demonstrate that speakers conform to this constraint and that their behavior is inexplicable by the statistical structure of the language. This analysis suggests that, unlike GPCs, phonological generalizations may exceed the training space. Thus, despite their success in modeling GPCs, eliminative connectionist models of phonology assembly may be unable to provide a complete account for phonology. To the extent that reading is subject to phonological constraints, its modeling may require implementing operations over variables.

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References

2011

The Handbook of Phonological Theory

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The representation of Hebrew words: Evidence from the obligatory contour principle

Cited by 104 publications

References 23 publications

“Tense” /æ/ is still lax: A phonotactics study

“Tense” /æ/ is still lax: A phonotactics study

Can connectionist models of phonology assembly account for phonology?

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