Linguistics and English Language

Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Svenja Wagner (CLE, University of Edinburgh)

Title: Acquiring fusional and agglutinating morphology can be similarly difficult

Abstract: Agglutinating morphology is commonly predicted to be easier to learn than fusional morphology due to its compositional transparency – there is a one-to-one mapping between meaning and form in agglutinating systems, but not in fusional systems (Goldschneider & DeKeyser 2001, Brown 1973, Dressler 2003, Haspelmath & Michaelis 2017, Brighton 2002). We test this hypothesis through a series of artificial language learning experiments in which participants learn nouns expressing the grammatical features of animacy and number in either a fusional or an agglutinating way. We find that when the system is small, there is no overall difference in learnability between both types of structures. However, our results provide some evidence that learners might have an a priori assumption that morphemes are transparent. In order to be able to exploit the benefits of agglutinating structures, learners need to segment words into their individual morphemes, which could mean an additional cost. However, our experiments show that segmentation costs alone cannot explain why the agglutinating system was not learned better. It is possible that the small size of the paradigm narrows the extent of the benefit for transparency. I will conclude the talk by discussing whether the longer words in the agglutinating condition could have posed a more significant difficulty in our learning paradigm.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Andres Karjus

Centre for Language Evolution

Sep 24 2019 -

Language evolution seminar

2019-09-24: Acquiring fusional and agglutinating morphology can be similarly difficult

Room G32, Psychology Building, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ