Morphophonological Rules Research Articles

Training Finnish morphology with a smartphone application in adult beginner level learners

The rich inflectional grammar of Finnish is often considered a challenge for second language (L2) learners. However, the inflectional variation is based on relatively systematic morphological and morphophonological rules. Smartphone applications could offer an effective way to train these rules by utilizing adaptive spaced repetition exercises. Currently there is little research on morphology learning via Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) applications in morphologically rich languages. The present study introduces a newly developed Finnish Morphology Application (FMA) that aims to teach beginner-level Finnish morphology. In a randomized controlled trial, the test group participants (n = 33) practiced Finnish morphology with the FMA during a three-week period, and their improvements were compared to those of an active control group using a general Finnish language learning application (n = 38). The practiced morphological operations comprised transparent and semi-transparent inflections. Pre- and posttests included a visual lexical decision task and a morphological production task. In comparison to the control group, the FMA group improved substantially in written morphological production skills, especially in transparent inflections. In visual lexical decision task, there was an improvement in accuracy for trained words in the FMA group, but this improvement applied to both transparent and semi-transparent inflections as well as monomorphemic nouns. In reaction times, there were no differences between the groups. Self-ratings of perceived efficacy of the FMA regarding grammar and vocabulary varied from neutral to positive. The results suggest that the FMA is particularly useful for learning inflectional production skills in Finnish by adult beginner level learners but can also be used to train word recognition.

Person indexation in Dpal.ri Smar

Abstract The article describes the person indexation system of Dpal.ri Smar, a little-studied Trans-Himalayan language spoken in Chab.mdo, Tibet. It gives paradigms of intransitive and transitive verbs, and categorizes verbs into different conjugations, revealing complex morphophonological rules. Additionally, it compares the system to Rgyalrongic languages, and explores the origin of the second person suffix “-əm” which is unique in the Trans-Himalayan family.

Phonological Variation in Child-Directed Speech is Modulated by Lexical Frequency.

We investigate whether child-directed speech (CDS) contains a higher proportion of canonical pronunciations compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), focusing on Korean noun stem-final obstruent variation. In a word-teaching task, we observed that mothers use a higher rate of canonical pronunciation when addressing infants than when addressing adults. In a follow-up experiment, adults exhibited a higher rate of canonical pronunciation for high- than low-frequency words. Additional analyses conducted with only the high-frequency monosyllabic words from the two experiments found no evidence for simplified phonology in CDS when lexical frequency was controlled for. Our findings suggest that the higher rate of canonical forms in CDS, with respect to Korean morphophonological rules, is mediated by the frequency of word usage. Thus, the didactic function of CDS phonology appears to be a byproduct of mothers using familiar words with children. These results highlight the importance of considering word usage in investigating the nature of CDS.

Impaired extraction and consolidation of morphological regularities in developmental dyslexia: A domain general deficit?

The current study examined whether adults with Developmental Dyslexia are impaired in learning linguistic regularities in a novel language, and whether this may be explained by a domain general deficit in the effect of sleep on consolidation. We compared online learning and offline consolidation of morphological regularities in individuals with Developmental Dyslexia (N = 40) and typical readers (N = 38). Participants learned to apply plural inflections to novel words based on morpho-phonological rules embedded in the input and learned to execute a finger motor sequence task. To test the effects of time and sleep on consolidation, participants were assigned into one of two sleep-schedule groups, trained in the evening or in the morning and tested 12 and 24 h later. Unlike typical readers, Dyslexic readers did not extract the morpho-phonological regularities during training and as a group they did not show offline gains in inflecting trained items 24 h after training, suggesting that the deficit in extraction of regularities during training may be related to the deficit in consolidation. The offline gains in dyslexic readers, were correlated with their prior phonological abilities, and were less affected by sleep than those of typical readers. Although no deficit was found in the consolidation of the motor task, dyslexic readers were again less successful in generating an abstract representation of the motor sequence, reflected in a difficulty to generalize the motor sequence knowledge acquired using one hand to the untrained hand. The results suggest that individuals with Developmental Dyslexia have a domain general deficit in extracting statistical regularities from an input. Within the language domain this deficit is reflected in reduced benefits of consolidation, particularly during sleep, perhaps due to reduced prior phonological abilities, which may impede the individual's ability to extract the linguistic regularities during and after training and thus constrain the consolidation process.

CKMorph: a comprehensive morphological analyzer for Central Kurdish

A morphological analyzer, a significant component of many natural language processing applications, especially for morphologically rich languages, divides an input word into all its composing morphemes and identifies their morphological roles. This paper introduces a comprehensive morphological analyzer for Central Kurdish (CK), also known as Sorani, a low-resourced language with rich morphology. Building upon the limited existing literature, we first assembled and systematically categorized an extensive collection of the morphological and morphophonological rules of the language. Additionally, we collected and manually labeled a generative lexicon containing nearly 10,000 verb, noun and adjective stems, named entities, and other types of word stems. We used these rule sets and resources to implement CKMorph Analyzer based on finite-state transducers. In order to provide a benchmark for future research, we collected, manually labeled, and publicly shared test sets for evaluating the accuracy and coverage of the analyzer. CKMorph was able to correctly analyze 95.9% of the first test set, containing 1000 CK words morphologically analyzed according to the context. Moreover, CKMorph gave at least one analysis for 95.5% of 4.22 M CK tokens of the second test set. The demonstration of the application and resources, including the CK verb database and test sets, are openly accessible at github.com/CKMorph.

Synthesizing theories of human language with Bayesian program induction

Automated, data-driven construction and evaluation of scientific models and theories is a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence. We present a framework for algorithmically synthesizing models of a basic part of human language: morpho-phonology, the system that builds word forms from sounds. We integrate Bayesian inference with program synthesis and representations inspired by linguistic theory and cognitive models of learning and discovery. Across 70 datasets from 58 diverse languages, our system synthesizes human-interpretable models for core aspects of each language’s morpho-phonology, sometimes approaching models posited by human linguists. Joint inference across all 70 data sets automatically synthesizes a meta-model encoding interpretable cross-language typological tendencies. Finally, the same algorithm captures few-shot learning dynamics, acquiring new morphophonological rules from just one or a few examples. These results suggest routes to more powerful machine-enabled discovery of interpretable models in linguistics and other scientific domains.

Perception and Reinterpretation of English Song Lyrics by Native Speakers of Japanese: A Case Study of Samples From the TV-Show Soramimi-Hour

Cross-linguistic mondegreens occur when foreign song lyrics are misperceived and reinterpreted in the listener's native language. In Japan, such humorous reinterpretations of non-native song lyrics are known assoramimi(空耳, “mishearing”). Word plays of this kind do not only have an entertaining character for listeners, but they also offer a valuable source to identify and describe potential phonological processes which can be observed in native Japanese listeners' adaptations of English song lyrics into Japanese. We hypothesized that the reinterpretation of English song lyrics by listeners is a result of the perception of non-native auditory input through the first language's phonological and morphological system. That is, misperceptions do not occur arbitrarily, but are governed by the phonological and morpho-phonological rules of the listener's first language system. To test this hypothesis, we examined a corpus containing 60 English-Japanese mondegreens taken from the Japanese TV-showSoramimi Awā(Soramimi Hour). Results confirmed our hypothesis: The Japanese adaptations were observed to follow different phonological processes which aimed to subject the non-native auditory input to the phonological rules of Japanese.

Effects of Sleep on Language and Motor Consolidation: Evidence of Domain General and Specific Mechanisms.

The current study explores the effects of time and sleep on the consolidation of a novel language learning task containing both item-specific knowledge and the extraction of grammatical regularities. We also compare consolidation effects in language and motor sequence learning tasks, to ask whether consolidation mechanisms are domain general. Young adults learned to apply plural inflections to novel words based on morphophonological rules embedded in the input, and learned to type a motor sequence using a keyboard. Participants were randomly assigned into one of two groups, practicing each task during either the morning or evening hours. Both groups were retested 12 and 24 hours post-training. Performance on frequent trained items in the language task stabilized only following sleep, consistent with a hippocampal mechanism for item-specific learning. However, regularity extraction, indicated by generalization to untrained items in the linguistic task, as well as performance on motor sequence learning, improved 24 hours post-training, irrespective of the timing of sleep. This consolidation process is consistent with a frontostriatal skill-learning mechanism, common across the language and motor domains. This conclusion is further reinforced by cross-domain correlations at the individual level between improvement across 24 hours in the motor task and in the low-frequency trained items in the linguistic task, which involve regularity extraction. Taken together, our results at the group and individual levels suggest that some aspects of consolidation are shared across the motor and language domains, and more specifically, between motor sequence learning and grammar learning.

Reaction times to morphologically inflected nonwords

Previous work has shown that monolingual speakers of English are sensitive to the presence of inflectional morphology when it is applied to nonwords. For example, when a nonword ends in a sequence of phonemes that respect the morphophonological rules regulating tense inflection, speakers are slower in recognising it. In this study, we investigated whether a similar pattern applies to second language learners as well. 91 learners of English with Czech as L1 where presented with a same/different minimal pairs task containing nonwords with various endings (in one condition, a sequence of phonemes that could be interpreted as an inflectional morpheme). Consistently with research on monolingual participants, the study showed that also second language learners are slower in processing nonwords that contain potential inflectional morphemes. The pattern was observed from low levels of proficiency, suggesting that learners are sensitive to these rules from early stages of learning.

Hizkuntza aldakortasunaz eta barietateen sailkapenez: aspektu ez-perfektuaren bariazioa Igorreko euskaran

Hizkuntza aldakortasunaren ikerkuntzan barietateen zein informatzaileen sailkapenak egiterakoan metodo kuantitatibo objektiboen baliagarritasuna nabarmentzea da lan honen xedea. Horretarako, Igorreko hiztun gazteek aspektu ez-perfektua egiteko erabiltzen dituzten arau morfo-fonologikoak deskribatu eta aztertu dira. Sistema Konplexu Dinamiko Moldagarrien (SKDM) teoriari jarraiki, azaleko forma hutsen azterketatik harago, azterketa linguistikoaren beharra aldarrikatu ondoren, hiru teknika sailkatzaile erabili dira informatzaileak sailkatzekotan: multzokatze azterketa hierarkikoa, DAE metodoa eta K-batezbestekoen multzokatzea (KM) (logika lausoaren hatsarretan oinarritzen dena). Tekniken azalpenekin batera azterketa osoaren emaitzak ere aurkezten ditugu lanaren amaieran.

There is no Stem: the Distribution of Verbal Allomorphs, a Distributed Morphology Analysis

It is widely accepted by traditional grammarians and linguists that Persian verbal roots fall into two forms depending on their tense feature: present stem and past stem. In contrast to this traditional view, the present study considers an alternative notion of allomorphy, indicating that a few verbs use a basic form, called “morph”, in all morphosyntactic contexts while some other roots allow for having two or more allomorphs. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, especially on the basis of underspecification condition, I will review the empirical evidence adduced in favor of the hypothesis that the tense feature has no role in producing and selecting the so-called present and past stems. In this approach, the systematic distribution of verbal allomorphs like /suz/ and /sux/ (derived from “OSUZ” = burn) is constrained by some other formal features, such as adjacency to the morphophoneme {D}, absorbing the causative suffix (“-ān” or its free variation “-un”) or appearing in the boundary of a word. Finally, to avoid terminological and empirical confusion, I will suggest that we should avoid the use of the term “stem” altogether and speak of root, morph and allomorphs only. It should be added that the different variations in phonetic shape of lexical roots are divided into two classes: the first one follows from the phonological rules and the second one is affected by the morphophonological (or readjustment) rules. Phonological changes are predictable and produce automatic alternations, but unpredictable morphophonological changes lead to non-automatic alternations. Following the general trend of DM, I restrict the term “allomorphy” to those cases in which the variation in phonetic shape of a morpheme does not follow from the automatic phonological rules of the language. This analysis raises the theoretical question of whether language-specific readjustment rules (i.e. the alteration of root or affix phonology) are needed for morphological theory. Rejecting readjustment rules, I show that allomorphs of verbal roots are independently stored in Vocabulary.

Еще раз о формах показателя множественного числа в тюркских языках

Introduction. The article continues the discussion of isogloss types and their relevance for the Proto-Turkic reconstruction and reconstruction of the intermediate nodes of the Turkic family tree. Goals. The paper makes another attempt to reconstruct the morphophonological appearance of some affixes for intermediate languages-ancestors of the standard Turkic group (Oguz, ‘Kyrgyz’, Altai, Karluk, Toba, Kypchak). The study draws into consideration not only the plural affix *-lar, but in general inflectional and derivational affixes starting with *-l. Materials and Methods. Methods of stepwise reconstruction are used simultaneously with morphophonological methods of identifying classes of positions and distribution of classes of allomorphs. Field records of dialects, dialectological publications, both modern ones and those of the 19th century, as well as written monuments were used as research material. Results. Both modern field data and classical sources, with the correct application of the methods of stepwise reconstruction, point that affixal *-l has no alternants in proto-Oghuz, proto-Karluk and proto-Qypchaq. All instances of alternation in modern idioms like dialectal Bashkir, dialectal Kazakh, ‘Qyrghyz’ languages, Yakut-Dolghan and Toba languages are to be classified as recent areal innovation. This is deduced due to the nature of morphophonological rules in these languages — neither is applyable for the proto-Common-Turkic stem auslaut, but instead is limited to forms that are specific to each separate group in question.

Do morphophonological exchange rules exist? A reply to DiCanio et al. (2020)

DiCanio et al. (2020) (this volume) argue that San Martín Itunyoso Triqui has a morphophonological exchange (also called ‘polarity’), where morphemes are realized by switching feature values: e.g. the bare root [anĩɦ] ‘get dirty’ is realized as [anĩː] in the 1s, while the root [aniː] ‘stop’ is 1s [anĩɦ]. In this Reply, I seek to clarify how the descriptive use of ‘exchange’ relates to and differs from its meaning in phonological theories. I also show that the issue of whether exchanges exist is highly theory-dependent. For SPE, Lexical Phonology and Morphology, and single-level parallelist OT with opacity mechanisms, the IT forms do not provide evidence for exchange mechanisms. In contrast, a version of OT that lacks opacity mechanisms probably cannot generate the IT forms without an exchange mechanism. Issues facing the analyst, such as how to prove that exchanges exist, and which apparent exchanges one should expect to observe, are also discussed.

Väljamõeldud morfoloogiareegli omandamine 8-aastastel lastel

Artiklis vaadeldakse valjamoeldud grammatikareegli omandamist katsesituatsioonis. Tegemist on esimese eestikeelse uuringuga, mis vaatleb seda, kuidas toimub morfoloogilise reegli omandamise protsess uldiselt. Uuringus on kasutatud Sara Fermani ja Avi Karni (2010, 2014) katse luhendatud ja eesti keele jaoks mugandatud varianti, kus katsealused peavad hindama keelelise stiimuli oigsust. Katse eesmark oli jalgida, kuidas muutub kaheksa katsealuse lapse ja vordlusgrupi ehk nelja taiskasvanu oigete vastuste hulk ja vastamiskiirus 11 katsesessiooni jooksul. Vaatluse all oli ka see, millest soltub reegli omandamine: kas tuve astmevahelduslikkusest voi subjekti elususest/elutusest. Tulemused naitavad, et kaheksast lapsest omandas reegli kuus, nende laste tulemused saavutasid maksimumilahedase oigete vastuste hulga kolmandaks sessiooniks. Vorreldes lapsi ja taiskasvanuid, voib oelda, et omandamine toimus uldjoontes sarnaselt. Astmevahelduslike ja astmevahelduseta verbide ning elusate ja elutute subjektide puhul ei olnud erinevused korrektsete vastuste hulgas ja vastamise kiiruses statistiliselt olulised. *** Acquisition of an artificial morphological rule by 8-year old Estonian children The aim of the current article is to present the first results of an experiment conducted with 8 Estonian children and 4 young adults as a control group for testing the acquisition of an artificial morphological rule (AMR). Each participant was individually trained in 10 consecutive daily training sessions (1–4 days apart) and re-tested for retention after an interval of one month. The experiment was based on the experiment conducted by Sara Ferman and Avi Karni (2010, 2014) but was shortened and adopted for Estonian language. The AMR was designed to be analogous to the morphophonological rules of Estonian grammar and participants were supposed to add different verbal suffixes depending on the animacy of the subject. Training occurred through exposure to and use of the AMR in the performance of a judgment task wherein the participants were instructed to make a forced-choice (correct – incorrect) response. Both the number of correct answers and reaction time were measured. There was no explicit instruction on the nature of the AMR at any time during the training. As a result of the experiment, 6 of the 8 children acquired the rule by the third session, their performance reaching to the level of approximately 85% of correct answers, while 2 children did not acquire the rule (the answers of one child were random from the first until the last session, the second child just decided that one of the suffixes was correct in every sentence). The increase in the number of correct answers and decrease of reaction time demonstrated a similar pattern in children’s and young adults’ results. The adults’ performance was 10% superior to that of the children. The results show that children did not give more correct answers to verbs occurring with animate subjects, nor did they perform better with verbs having different morphophonological structure (grade alternation of the verb stem).

TRMOR: a finite-state-based morphological analyzer for Turkish

Morphological analysis is an important component of natural language processing systems like spelling correction tools, parsers, machine translation systems, and dictionary tools. In this paper, we present TRMOR, a morphological analyzer for Turkish, which uses the SFST tool (Stuttgart Finite-State Transducer). TRMOR can be freely used for academic research (see http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~schmid/tools/SFST/). It covers a large part of Turkish morphology including inflection, derivation, and some compounding. It uses morphotactic and morphophonological rules and a stem lexicon. We describe the morphological structure of Turkish, explain the phonological and morphological rules implemented in TRMOR, evaluate the system, and test it in special cases. The evaluation of TRMOR was executed on gold-standard words. One thousand words were randomly selected from Wikipedia word lists. For those words, we achieved gold-standard analysis. TRMOR has 94.12 % precision on these 1000 words that were randomly selected from Wikipedia word lists. Morphological analyses of Turkish are prepared for the gold-standard version since, to our knowledge, there is no gold-standard segmentation available for Turkish morphological analyzers for noncommercial purposes.

Improving Low-Resource Morphological Learning with Intermediate Forms from Finite State Transducers

Neural encoder-decoder models are usually applied to morphology learning as an end-to-end process without considering the underlying phonological representations that linguists posit as abstract forms before morphophonological rules are applied. Finite State Transducers for morphology, on the other hand, are developed to contain these underlying forms as an intermediate representation. This paper shows that training a bidirectional two-step encoder-decoder model of Arapaho verbs to learn two separate mappings between tags and abstract morphemes and morphemes and surface allomorphs improves results when training data is limited to 10,000 to 30,000 examples of inflected word forms.

Irregular Morphology and Athematic Verbs in Italo-Romance

The article deals with irregularities in the morphological make-up of Italian verbal forms, focusing on perfect and past participle forms. It aims to account for root-based contextual allomorphy in the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993). Building upon the generalisation that morphological irregularities result whenever the thematic vowel is absent, the article provides a synchronic account and a diachronic analysis by means of a restricted set of morphophonological rules, thus challenging both the traditional view, according to which morphological irregularities follow from stress positioning, and paradigm-based accounts.

Do morphophonological rules impact both regular and irregular verb inflection? Evidence from acquired morphological impairment

Do morphophonological rules impact both regular and irregular verb inflection? Evidence from acquired morphological impairment

English

This study set out to investigate how Lubukusu borrows words from English and yet the two differ widely in terms of phonemic inventories. Borrowing of words form English to Lubukusu required assimilation processes to enable the transfer of characteristics of one language into the other. The study identified and described the morphophonological change that the loan words from English go through to fit into Lubukusu speech system and established morphophonological rules that account for the changes. The study adopted the theory Natural Generative phonology (NGP) which was propagated by Hopper (1976) as the theoretical framework. Sampling procedure was used to arrive at the fields most affected and sample population. Eighty speakers of Lubukusu from Bumula Division, Bungoma district were interviewed, ten respondents from each field of Education, Police, Health, Mechanics, commerce, Building and Construction, Religion and domestic. An interview schedule was used in data collection. The loan words were also recorded on a magnetic tape during articulation for the sake of analysis to get a clear picture of their morphophonological structure. The Loan words were transcribed for Morphophonological analysis. It was evident that there were lot of consonantal changes like consonant insertion, consonant deletion and consonant substitution among others. There were also vowel changes that were observed such as vowel deletion, vowel substitution and vowel insertion. No single loan word was found to maintain its original morphophonological structure when it moved from English to Lubukusu in both singular and Plural form. The study contributes to linguistic scholarship in the area of Lubukusu Morphophonemics. The knowledge acquired could be utilized by institutions of higher learning and translation centres. It was recommended that more studies like the current study should be conducted in the rest of the remaining dialects of Luhyia to give a clear picture of how Luhyia borrows words from English and also the suprasegmental level should be considered.   Keywords: Lubukusu, English, higher learning and translation, languages, communication.

Moraic prefixes and suffixes in Anywa

Morphological subtraction, shortening and polarity pose a major problem for a concatenative approach to the morphology–phonology interface (Anderson, 1992; Wolf, 2005, 2007; Alber and Arndt-Lappe, 2012). In this paper, I show that two of the best-documented instances of these processes, vowel shortening and vowel length polarity in Anywa (Reh, 1993) follow from the concatenative affixation of floating moras and general phonological constraints under the assumption of an autosegmental version of Optimality Theory which adopts the Radical Containment assumption: underlying phonological elements and association lines may not be literally deleted in output representations. Under this approach, it becomes unnecessary to derive these effects by morphophonological rules or morpheme-specific constraints on paradigmatic distinctness such as Antifaithfulness (Alderete, 1999, 2001) or Kurisu's (2001) version of Realize Morpheme. The difference between shortening and polarity can be reduced to a standard property of bound morphemes: polarizing affixes in Anywa are prefixes, shortening affixes are suffixes.