Conservativity in the scope of phonological generalization learning

Abstract

Phonological alternations that arise due to morphological concatenation often serve to enforce static phonotactic generalizations within the lexicon. Due to this close link, knowledge about alternations and phonotactics are encoded using a single mechanism in constraint-based models like Optimality Theory. Evidence of this link in learning, however, is equivocal. In this study we examine whether learners readily extend a generalization from alternations to phonotactics. Learners were trained on consonant harmony alternations that involved harmony between a suffix and stem consonant, while stems were ambiguous in terms of phonotactic generalizations. We then examined whether learners extended the alternation generalization to phonotactic judgments about novel stems. While learners successfully learned the alternations in training, they failed to extend this generalization to phonotactic judgments about novel stems. Taken together with previous findings, our results suggest that learners are conservative in extending learned generalizations to unseen morphological contexts. Overall, these results suggest that the link between phonotactics and alternations might not be as tight as previously suggested.