Level-specific learning biases in the regularisation of unconditioned variation: The case of morphological inflection and word order
Carmen Saldana (Edinburgh)
Tuesday 8 November 2016, 11:00–12:30
1.17 Dugald Stewart Building
Human languages contain very little unconditioned variation but occasionally, language learners are exposed to input that contains inconsistencies. Learners under those circumstances tend to reduce or remove such inconsistencies, in other words, they regularise their input. The product of such regularisation is a language that better conforms to the learner’s cognitive biases, i.e. easier to learn and use.
Regularisation behaviour has been documented extensively in natural language in different contexts (e.g. language acquisition and development, language change, and in emerging languages) and at different levels (e.g. morphology, syntax and the lexicon). Evidence from Creole typology suggests that in stages of observed pidginization followed by nativisation, where the pidgin system is highly inconsistent and linguistic performance is limited, linguistic levels might behave differently: morphological complex traits such as inflectional morphology seem to be highly simplified whilst syntactic traits such as word order tend to reproduce the input complexity more closely.
There is a vast literature on Artificial Language Learning on regularisation behaviour on various different linguistic units at different linguistic levels. Nevertheless no systematic comparison across linguistic levels has been published. In this talk we present an artificial language learning experiment that constitutes the first attempt to compare the effect of linguistic level (morphological inflection vs. word order) on regularisation behaviour. Adult learners in our experiment are exposed to a miniature artificial language featuring an inconsistent mixture of synonymous variants. This mix of variants models the uncertainty in the input to which learners are exposed to in periods of language change or in language formation. Not only are we interested to see how learners shift the input languages to languages that better conform to their biases but also to explore the extent to which that shift is comparable across linguistic levels. We therefore use this paradigm to test regularisation across levels with comparable complexities as well as its level-specific strength.
Our results do not comply with the creole typology predictions and word order seems to be more regularised than morphological inflection under certain circumstances and equally so under others. We will show that level-specific learning biases are at play in the acquisition of morphology and word order and will discuss how they affect the differences in regularisation behaviour obtained in our study.