Speaker: Si Berrebi (MIT)
Title: Category mergers are irrecoverable even with robust distributional evidence
Time: Sunday, February 9th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Can a covert phonological category be learned based on the distribution, without phonetic evidence? Although this idea was debated extensively, it has yet to be tested whether individual speakers have successfully acquired covert categories. I examine a case from Modern Hebrew in which [ħ] and [χ] have undergone a merger in the majority dialect, yet historical alternations triggered by the pharyngeal are preserved in hundreds of words. Speakers of a minority dialect still produce [ħ] and [χ] as distinct, thus allowing for a direct comparison between the status of /ħ/ among speakers who have phonetic evidence for the distinction, and those who received only phonological evidence. Using a new linguistic game paradigm, validated by a small study of non-merged dialect speakers, I show that merged Hebrew speakers generally cannot represent /ħ/ as distinct from [χ] based on its distribution. I’ll discuss tentative conclusions and future directions for this project.