What happens to large changes? Saltation produces well-liked outputs that are hard to generate

Abstract

Saltatory alternations ‘skip over’ intermediate sounds, as in k~s skipping over [t]. Recent research has argued that saltation is diachronically unstable and documented one possible cause of instability: Learners exposed to saltatory alternations may overgeneralize them to intermediate sounds. However, this research has trained participants to criterion or excluded participants who did not reach criterion accuracy on familiar sounds. In first language acquisition, learners of languages with saltatory patterns cannot hope to receive more exposure to the pattern than those learning non-saltatory patterns. For this reason, we examined learning of saltatory and non-saltatory patterns after a constant amount of training. We compared saltatory labial palatalization to non-saltatory alveolar and velar palatalization. Participants showed overgeneralization of saltatory palatalization in a judgment task. However, saltatory alternations did not result in increased rates of palatalizing similar sounds, compared to non-saltatory alternations. Instead, saltatory alternations were less likely to be produced than non-saltatory alternations. These results suggest that large, saltatory alternations may be diachronically unstable because they are harder to (learn to) produce. Instead of being overgeneralized to intermediate sounds, saltatory alternations may disappear from the language by losing productivity and being replaced with faithful mappings.