Adam Albright

Modeling English Past Tense Intuitions with Minimal Generalization

We describe here a supervised learning model that, given paradigms of related words, learns the morphological and phonological rules needed to derive the paradigm. The model can use its rules to make guesses about how novel forms would be inflected, and has been tested experimentally against the intuitions of human speakers.

Feature-based generalisation as a source of gradient acceptability *

Phonological judgements are often gradient: blick >? bwick >* bnick >** bzick . The mechanisms behind gradient generalisation remain controversial, however. This paper tests the role of phonological features in helping speakers evaluate which novel combinations receive greater lexical support. A model is proposed in which the acceptability of a string is based on the most probable combination of natural classes that it instantiates. The model is tested on its ability to predict acceptability ratings of nonce words, and its predictions are compared against those of models that lack features or economise on feature specifications. The proposed model achieves the best balance of performance on attested and unattested sequences, and is a significant predictor of acceptability even after the other models are factored out. The feature-based models predictions do not completely subsume those of simpler models, however. This may indicate multiple levels of evaluation, involving segment-based phonotactic probability and feature-based gradient phonological grammaticality.

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

This paper investigates whether and how speakers track the relative frequency of different patterns of alternation in the lexicon, by investigating speakers’ behavior when they are faced with unpredictability in allomorph selection. We conducted a wug test on Seoul Korean verb paradigms, testing whether speakers can generalize reliable lexical patterns. The test was performed in two directions. In forward formation test, the pre-vocalic base and pre-consonantal non-base forms were the stimulus and response, respectively, whereas in backward formation test, the stimulus–response relation was switched. The results show patterns approximating statistical patterns in Seoul Korean verb lexicon, thus confirming the lexical frequency matching reported in many previous studies. However, contrary to the conventional assumption, the results of the backward formation test are consistent with lexical frequencies relevant for the forward formation, not backward formation. This observed asymmetry is broadly consistent with the single base hypothesis (Albright 2002a , b , 2005 , 2008 ), in which forward, as opposed to backward formation rules play a privileged role in speakers’ morphological grammar.