Lexical and Social Effects on the Learning and Integration of Inflectional Morphology

Abstract

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social context is less understood.

We report on the results of an innovative experimental battery designed to test how learning variation is affected by a variable's social indexicality. Hungarian native speakers played a co-operative game involving verb nonwords. These were built on existing inflectional variation in Hungarian. Participant behavior shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, and this reflected a change in the overall lexical patterns of the players, affected by the particular verbs introduced by the co-player. Patterns persisted in subsequent testing. Learning was similar for variables with or without social meaning.

Results show that participants can learn and retain a range of variable morphological patterns in a simulated interaction. Participants seem to have equal capacity to pick up variables with and without social meaning. This suggests that the social meaning of a pattern does not clearly constrain learning morphological variation and becomes relevant downstream in learning.