Testing the Allomorph Selection Hypothesis

This study examines Taiwanese tone sandhi, which is hypothesized here as a process of choosing between two allomorphs that are both listed in the lexicon. A production experiment was designed to test this hypothesis. Effects of age group, allomorph frequency, and positions of the morpheme were examined in the experiment. The results showed that (1) older speakers had significantly higher accuracy rate than younger ones, (2) Taiwanese TTS production was significantly influenced by allomorph frequency even with morpheme frequency factored out, (3) for young speakers, the allomorph frequency effect was modulated by the position of the target item, (4) a majority of the tone production errors were allomorph selection errors, (5) there was no consistent pattern in productivity across the five tone categories.