Rules vs. Analogy in English
Past Tenses:
A Computational/Experimental Study
Cognition 90 (2003) 119–161
Adam Albright Department of Linguistics, MIT |
Bruce Hayes
Department of Linguistics, UCLA |
Are
morphological patterns learned in the form of rules? Some models deny this,
attributing all morphology to analogical mechanisms. The dual mechanism model
(Pinker & Prince, 1988) posits that speakers do internalize rules, but
that these rules are few and cover only regular processes; the remaining
patterns are attributed to analogy. This article advocates a third approach,
which uses multiple stochastic rules and no analogy. Our model employs inductive
learning to discover multiple rules, and assigns them confidence scores based
on their performance in the lexicon.
Our
model is supported over the two alternatives by new "wug test" data on English
past tenses. As our model predicts, participant ratings of novel pasts depend
on the phonological shape of the stem, both for irregulars and, surprisingly,
also for regulars. The latter observation cannot be explained under the dual
mechanism approach, which derives all regulars with a single rule. To evaluate
the alternative hypothesis that all morphology is analogical, we implemented
a purely analogical model, which evaluates novel pasts based solely on their
similarity to existing verbs. Tested against experimental data, this analogical
model also failed in key respects: it could not locate patterns that require
abstract structural characterizations, and it favored implausible responses
based on single, highly similar exemplars. We conclude that speakers extend
morphological patterns based on abstract structural properties, of a kind
appropriately described with rules.
[top]
[top]
The copyright for this article is held by Elsevier B.V., which grants to authors "the right to retain a preprint version on a public electronic server."
Last updated: January 24, 2017