Category Clustering and Morphological Learning.

ABSTRACT: Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward category clustering is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one generation to the next if each inflectional category has a consistent morphological position. We test this in an online artificial language experiment, teaching adult English speakers a miniature language consisting of noun stems representing shapes and suffixes representing the color and number features of each shape. In one experimental condition, each suffix category has a fixed position, with color in the first position and number in the second position.

SUBMITTER: Mansfield J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9285891 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature