Modeling Productivity with the Gradual Learning Algorithm: The Problem of Accidentally Exceptionless Generalizations

Many cases of gradient intuitions reflect conflicting patterns in the data that the child receives during language acquisition. An area in which learners frequently face conflicting data is inflectional morphology, where different words often follow different patterns. Thus, for English past tenses, we have wing ~ winged (the most common pattern in the language) wring ~ wrung (a widespread [] ~ [] pattern), and sing ~ sang (a less common [] ~ [ae] pattern). In cases where all of these patterns could apply, such as the novel verb spling, the conflict between them leads English speakers to entertain multiple possibilities, with competing outcomes falling along a gradient scale of intermediate well-formedness (Bybee and Moder 1983; Prasada and Pinker 1993; Albright and Hayes 2003).

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