Learning reduplicative templates as hidden structures: the case of reduplication-phonology interactions

Yang Wang


Abstract
Models of morphophonological learning have focused primarily on concatenative processes, leaving the challenges of non-concatenative morphology largely unaddressed. Reduplication, the systematic copying operation (e.g., Ilokano pluralization [kal-kaldÍN] ‘goats’), is particularly revealing because successful learning requires the joint inference of prosodic templates that govern copying, underlying representations (URs) of stems and other affixes, and the phonological grammar. In this paper, we present a learner that tackles this challenge by allowing reduplication to be learned alongside general morphophonemic alternations, a combination that, to our knowledge, has not been directly modeled in prior computational work. We show that the learner successfully captures the attested typology of reduplication–phonology interaction.
Anthology ID:
2026.scil-main.43
Volume:
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, CA
Editors:
Rob Voigt, Alex Warstadt, Naomi Feldman, Tal Linzen
Venues:
SCiL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
460–463
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.43/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Wang. 2026. Learning reduplicative templates as hidden structures: the case of reduplication-phonology interactions. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026, pages 460–463, San Diego, CA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning reduplicative templates as hidden structures: the case of reduplication-phonology interactions (Wang, SCiL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.43.pdf