Inductive Bias against Stem Changes as Perseveration: Experimental Evidence for an Articulatory Approach to Output-Output Faithfulness

Speakers of morphologically-rich languages commonly face what has been called the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem: they know some form of a word but it is inappropriate to the current context, leading them to derive a form of that word they have never encountered (e.g., they know the singular form of a noun, and now need to produce the plural). We suggest that in performing this task speakers perseverate on articulatory gestures comprising the form they know, and that gestures vary in the extent to which speakers perseverate on them. This proposal explains the parallels between findings in loanword adaptation, speech errors, and acquisition of phonology. New experimental data from a miniature artificial language are presented in support of the theory.