The Roles of Acquisition and Usage in Morphological Change

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Morphological convergence as on-line lexical analogy

The English past-tense contains pockets of variation, where regular and irregular forms compete (e.g. learned/learnt, or weaved/wove). Individuals vary considerably in the degree to which they prefer irregular forms. This paper examines the degree to which individuals may converge on their regularization patterns and preferences. We report on a novel experimental methodology, using a cooperative game involving nonce verbs. Analysis of participants' post-game responses indicates that their behavior has shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, on two dimensions. First, players regularize more after playing with peers with high regularization rates, and less after playing with peers with low regularization rates. Second, players' overall pattern of regularization is also affected by the particular distribution of (ir)regular forms produced by the peer. We model the effects of the exposure on participants' morphological preferences, using both a rule-based model and an instance-based analogical model (Albright & Hayes, 2003; Nosofsky, 1988). Both models contribute separately and significantlyto explaining participants' pre-exposure regularization processes. However, only the instance-based model captures the shift in preferences that arises after exposure to the peer. We argue that the results suggest an account of morphological convergence in which new word forms are stored in memory, and online generalizations are formed over these instances

Non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders have a Māori proto-lexicon

We investigate implicit vocabulary learning by adults who are exposed to a language in their ambient environment. Most New Zealanders do not speak Māori, yet are exposed to it throughout their lifetime. We show that this exposure leads to a large proto-lexicon – implicit knowledge of the existence of words and sub-word units without any associated meaning. Despite not explicitly knowing many Māori words, non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders are able to access this proto-lexicon to distinguish Māori words from Māori-like nonwords. What's more, they are able to generalize over the proto-lexicon to generate sophisticated phonotactic knowledge, which lets them evaluate the well-formedness of Māori-like nonwords just as well as fluent Māori speakers

Non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders have a Māori proto-lexicon

We investigate implicit vocabulary learning by adults who are exposed to a language in their ambient environment. Most New Zealanders do not speak Māori, yet are exposed to it throughout their lifetime. We show that this exposure leads to a large proto-lexicon – implicit knowledge of the existence of words and sub-word units without any associated meaning. Despite not explicitly knowing many Māori words, non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders are able to access this proto-lexicon to distinguish Māori words from Māori-like nonwords. What's more, they are able to generalize over the proto-lexicon to generate sophisticated phonotactic knowledge, which lets them evaluate the well-formedness of Māori-like nonwords just as well as fluent Māori speakers

Ko te mōhiotanga huna o te hunga kore kōrero i te reo Māori (The implicit knowledge of non-Māori speakers)

This article outlines recent experiments on the implicit knowledge of non-Māori speakers living in New Zealand. It expands on the work of Oh et al. (2020) who show that, despite not knowing the language, non-Māori speakers have impressive phonotactic and lexical knowledge, which has presumably been built through ambient exposure to the language. In this paper, we extend this work by investigating morphological and syntactic knowledge. Experiment 1 asks non-Māori speakers to morphologically segment Māori words. It shows that they have an impressive degree of ability to recognize Māori morphs, and also that their false segmentations are in the locations that are phonotactically most likely to be morpheme boundaries. Experiment 2 asks non-Māori speakers to rate the likelihood that Māori sentences are grammatical. They rate grammatical Māori sentences significantly higher than matched sentences containing the same words in the wrong order. Their error patterns reveal significant sensitivity to legal versus non-legal sentence endings. Taken together, the results reveal that ambient exposure to te reo Māori leads to extensive subconscious knowledge regarding te reo Māori, and provide a strong real-world example of implicit language learning

The evidence add ups : a speech error study of prefabs in the lexicon

In a usage-based model of the lexicon, linguistic elements that repeatedly co-occur in sequence come to form a processing unit (Bybee 2002b). The present study supplements previous psycholinguistic research finding that multiword sequences may form a ‘prefabricated’ sequence. I describe a new experiment designed to elicit ‘affix shift’ speech errors (e.g., adds up → add ups), which give evidence of holistic processing of a multiword sequence. Analysis of the data indicates that affix positioning errors are predicted by a confluence of factors – a high-frequency stimulus sequence (settle down) in tandem with low-frequency component words (settle, down). These findings provide support for a usage-based account, in which linguistic units are not fixed, but gradient and changeable with experience

Multiword units and the detection of statistical patterns in French

This chapter provides examples of different approaches to quantifying the co-occurrence of multiword sequences in corpora. It provides a brief overview of several methods for interpreting the frequency of word co-occurrence (including absolute and relative metrics), referencing some of the psycholinguistic research in this area. The chapter discusses several approaches, with illustrations from quantitative analyses of French corpus data, including comments on applications and potential statistical pitfalls. These discussions point toward a model of language change and cognition in which different statistical metrics serve complementary roles, both in cognition and in empirical corpus-based research. In a generative model, there is no reason to expect that frequency of multiword units would affect processing; sentences are expected to be generated by rules, and frequencies are irrelevant. However, a number of experiments provide evidence that sequences that are high in token frequency are easier for speakers to process

Emergence at the cross-linguistic level : attractor dynamics in language change

Recent research on language change in a broad cross‐linguistic perspective shows that patterns of change are very similar even in languages that are unrelated both genetically and areally. This chapter analyzes closely two types of paths of change: those evident in sound change, and those resulting in grammaticalization. It draws several parallels with the study of non‐linear dynamic systems. Attractor states A cross‐linguistic view of phonological inventories of segments shows a non‐random distribution of segment types across the languages of the world. Just as attractors may take various forms in physical systems, there are several ways in which attractors may be applicable to language. The chapter discusses the attractor states in language, which may be further visualized by observing certain parallels with evolutionary biology. It also discusses language change in terms of attractor trajectories that is, diachronic paths that recur in language after language

The emergence of linguistic structure in an online iterated learning task

Previous research by Kirby et al. has found that strikingly compositional language systems can be developed in the laboratory via iterated learning of an artificial language. However, our reanalysis of the data indicates that while iterated learning prompts an increase in language compositionality, the increase is followed by an apparent decrease. This decrease in compositionality is inexplicable, and seems to arise from chance events in a small dataset (four transmission chains). The current study thus investigates the iterated emergence of language structure on a larger scale using Amazon Mechanical Turk, encompassing twenty-four independent chains of learners over ten generations. This richer dataset provides further evidence that iterated learning causes languages to become more compositional, although the trend levels off before the 10th generation. Moreover, analysis of the data (and reanalysis of Kirby et al.) reveals that systematic units arise along some meaning dimensions before others, giving insight into the biases of learners

Participants conform to humans but not to humanoid robots in an English past tense formation task

In this article, we discuss the results of an experiment designed to test the boundaries of linguistic imitation in a group setting. While most prior work has focused on convergence in either sound structure or syntax, we investigate whether speakers’ choices in verb morphology are influenced by others. The experiment uses an Asch-type peer pressure methodology. Participants give responses to target stimuli in a verbal and a visual task in a group of human peers, a group of robots, or alone. These results demonstrate that morphological conformity occurs, but that it is socially constrained—it happens with human peers but not with robot peers. This supports a view of linguistic convergence as a deeply social process. The level of linguistic conformity displayed by individuals is related to their degree of conformity in nonlinguistic tasks, suggesting that there are individual propensities toward peer imitation that transcend modalities