Islands of Reliability for Regular Morphology: Evidence from Italian

Abstract

The representation of regular morphological processes has been the subject of much controversy, particularly in the debate between single and dual route models of morphology. I present a model of morphological learning that posits rules and seeks to infer their productivity by comparing their reliability in different phonological environments. The result of this procedure is a grammar in which general rules exist alongside more specific, but more reliable, generalizations describing subregularities for the same process. I present results from a nonce-probe (wug) experiment in Italian, in which speakers rated the acceptability of novel infinitives in various conjugation classes. These results indicate that such subregularities are in fact internalized by speakers, even for a regular morphological process.

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