Acquiring agglutinating and fusional languages can be similarly difficult: Evidence from an adaptive tracking study

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

Research on the acquisition of morphology commonly predicts that agglutinating systems should be easier to learn than fusional systems. This is argued to be due to compositional transparency: the mapping between morphemes and meanings is one-to-one in agglutinating systems, but not in fusional systems. This is supported by findings in first and second language learning (Goldschneider & DeKeyser 2001, Slobin 1973), typology (Dressler 2003, Haspelmath & Michaelis 2017), and language evolution (Brighton 2002). We present findings from a series of artificial language learning experiments which complicate this picture. First, we show that when only two features (e.g., NOUN CLASS and NUMBER) are morphologically encoded, the learnability of fusional and agglutinating systems does not differ significantly. This finding holds when learners are given an additional cue to morpheme segmentation-which in principle should make the agglutinating system easier. However, the error patterns of the two groups provide some evidence that learners might have a bias for transparent structures. Our results suggest that the advantages of agglutinating over fusional systems may be overstated, particularly when a small number of features are encoded. Since agglutinating systems likely bear additional costs (e.g., segmentation, longer word length, and the online cost of mapping between morphemes and meanings), such systems do not guarantee learning ease under all circumstances.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Place of PublicationMontreal
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages3050-3056
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9780991196777
Publication statusPublished - 27 Jul 2019
Event41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 24 Jul 201927 Jul 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
ISSN (Electronic)1069-7977

Conference

Conference41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period24/07/1927/07/19

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • agglutinating
  • artificial language learning
  • fusional
  • language acquisition
  • morphology
  • transparency

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