Similarity Effects on the Emergence of Default Inflection in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This study investigates the similarity effects that determine the default inflection in the nominal system of Jordanian Arabic (JA). Unlike the single route hypothesis (e.g. Rumelhart and McClelland 1986), the dual-route account assumes that regular and irregular forms are stored and processed in two autonomous systems (e.g. Kim et al. 1994; Pinker 1999, Pinker and Prince 1998, Pinker and Ullman 2002, Clahsen et al. 2015). A Paired Sample t-test was used to measure the effects of similarity on agreement between the inflected forms and the base forms. We used 40 triplicate words designed by analogy to 20 pairs of existing JA nouns (base nouns) given to 20 JA native speakers. The results showed that JA speakers manifested tight matching of inflection among irregular forms which was not observed with regularly inflected forms. The results of the study support the idea that the regular inflection is a default; such observation indicates that the regular inflection applies regardless of the similarity of the target to existing regular tokens. The default inflection is triggered by an ‘elsewhere condition’ upon the failure to activate a similar irregular token in associative memory (Kiparsky 1973). This research also provides evidence on the regular inflection application to non-word targets that show phonological distance from their base nouns. Keywords: Jordanian Arabic, default, similarity, sound feminine, regular inflection.