Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphological Dependencies

This project investigates how speakers of a language know the various forms a word can take. For many decades, linguists have established that speakers can learn and generalize over statistical trends in the language to create new forms of words that they have never previously encountered. On the other hand, in some cases speakers must memorize the behavior of individual forms that do not follow common patterns.

This project explores the interplay between generalization and memorization by examining whether speakers take one form of a word into account when figuring out how to make another form. It aims to show that speakers can form these sorts of generalizations, thus improving our understanding of how speakers learn and maintain complicated systems in which a word can appear in many different forms.

Each of the four languages studied in this project involves a case where two forms of a word show interpredictability: if a word takes suffix A in one context, it is also likely to take suffix B in a different context. These statistical tendencies will first be established by analyzing a dictionary or corpus of texts in the language. Next, a series of experiments will be run with speakers of the relevant language.

In each experiment, speakers will be shown plausible but unattested words of their language with different suffixes in a number of contexts and asked to provide an additional suffixed form. The given forms will vary; the hypothesis is that speakers will similarly vary the suffixes they choose for the new forms, roughly mimicking the statistical tendencies of their language.

To account for these correlations, this project develops a theoretical approach in which the forms of a word are associated with markers on that word's mental entry, and speakers learn generalizations over which sets of markers tend to cooccur within a single entry.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.