Lexical and social effects on the learning and integration of inflectional morphology

Abstract

Sociolinguistic salience plays a role in learning linguistic variation. Evidence shows that people weigh linguistic variants and different conversation partners differently, based on socio-contextual associations. We also know that people have detailed linguistic representations and can make fine adjustments based on incoming stimuli. What remains unclear is how sociolinguistic salience mediates the larger learning process. Are socially salient variants easier to learn? Are they easier to retain? How do they interact with existing language experience? Does social salience precede or succeed linguistic accommodation? We report on the results of an innovative experimental battery designed to test these questions. Hungarian native speakers played a co-operative game involving nonce verbs, with subsequent re-testing. The nonce verbs were built on existing inflectional variation in Hungarian. Analysis of participant responses indicated that their behaviour shifted in response to an automated co-player’s preferences, and that this reflected a change in the overall lexical patterns of the players, affected by the particular distribution of verbs introduced by the co-player. Patterns persisted in delayed re-testing. Learning patterns were similar for stimuli with socially salient higher-order indices and stimuli with no clear social meaning.The results show that, when pressed, participants can learn and retain a range of variable morphological patterns in a simulated interaction. Participants have equal capacity to pick up the salient and the non-salient variable pattern, which, in turn, indicates that the salience of a pattern does not clearly constrain learning morphological variation and likely becomes relevant downstream in linguistic interaction.