Recovering morphology from local phonotactic constraints

Introduction: Implicit phonotactic knowledge emerges from learners’ exposure to languagespecific distributional information. Gradience in acceptability judgements based on phonotactic knowledge has been extensively reported on for verbal short-term memory, language processing and acquisition [1, 4]. ‘Wordlikeness’ studies [2] distinguish between two different types of knowledge involved in production/judgement of novel words: (a) phonotactic (string level); (b) lexical (word level). Different statistical models are used to shape the two types of knowledge (bigram/trigram transition probability for (a) and lexical neighborhood for (b) [3]). In this work, we propose that the phonotactic level and the word level should not be conceived of as two independent, blind domains, but rather as interconnected systems interacting in a bottom-up fashion. More specifically, we test the hypothesis that the interplay of phonotactic local constraints and frequency-sensitive word patterns is powerful enough to enable over-ranked morphological patterns to be recovered from rough data. In inflectional languages, such as Italian, function morphemes are predominantly inserted by suffixation and they tend therefore to occupy the right edge of the word. We hypothesize that, in such languages, similarity effects will emerge more salient at the right edge of a word than in other positions, all other things being equal