Are there limits to statistical learning?
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Iris Berent
Publications and source records attributed to Iris Berent.
The scope of linguistic generalizations: evidence from Hebrew word formation.
Does the productive use of language stem from the manipulation of mental variables (e.g. "noun", "any consonant")? If linguistic constraints appeal to variables, rather than instances (e.g. "dog", "m"), then they should generalize to any representable novel instance, including instances that fall beyond the phonological space of a language. We test this prediction by investigating a constraint on the structure of Hebrew roots. Hebrew frequently exhibits geminates (e.g. ss) in its roots, but it strictly constraints their location: geminates are frequent at the end of the root (e.g. mss), but rare at its beginning (e.g. ssm). Symbolic accounts capture the ban on root-initial geminates as *XXY, where X and Y are variables that stand for any two distinct consonants. If the constraint on root structure appeals to the identity of abstract variables, then speakers should be able to extend it to root geminates with foreign phonemes, including phonemes with foreign feature values. We present findings from three experiments supporting this prediction. These results suggest that a complete account of linguistic processing must incorporate mechanisms for generalization outside the representational space of trained items. Mentally-represented variables would allow speakers to make such generalizations.
Adult↗
The nature of regularity and irregularity: evidence from Hebrew nominal inflection.
Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base's phonology (e.g., rat-rats), whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it (e.g., mouse-mice). The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that do not resemble existing nouns and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names (e.g., the Barak-Barakim), they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns (e.g., barak-brakim "lightning"), replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as "regular" or "irregular"; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.
Humans↗
Identity avoidance in the Hebrew lexicon: implications for symbolic accounts of word formation.
Hebrew frequently exhibits geminates in the root but strictly constrains their location: Root-initial gemination is rare (e.g., ssm), whereas root-final gemination (e.g., smm) is frequent. Four experiments demonstrate that Hebrew speakers generalize this constraint to novel roots. When speakers are encouraged to form a triliteral root from a biconsonantal input (e.g., sm), they frequently reduplicate the root's final radical (e.g., smm), but not its initial radical (e.g., ssm). Likewise, the rejection of novel root foils with root initial geminates is easier than roots with final geminates. In both cases, speakers' performance is inexplicable by the statistical structure of the Hebrew language. Speakers' ability to freely generalize the constraint on root structure suggests that their linguistic competence appeals to mental variables.
Humans↗