The next seminar in the series Linguistics Circle will be held on Thursday 19 October from 15:00 to 16:00 in Room 112 Old Humanities Building (OH112), University of Malta Msida Campus. Shiloh Drake, University of Arizona will talk about 'L1 biases in learning root-and-pattern morphology'.
Abstract
This work explores how native language biases affect how root-and-pattern morphology is learned in the lab. While researchers have shown that learning non-adjacent dependencies, such as those found in vowel harmony, root-and-pattern morphology, or in verb agreement, are difficult for English and French native speakers to track and learn (e.g., Gómez, 2002; Newport & Aslin, 2004; Bonatti et al., 2005), other work shows that if a speaker’s native language requires them to attend to non-adjacent dependencies, they will be able to learn an artificial grammar that employs analogous non-adjacent dependencies (LaCross, 2011, 2015). To this end, my work uses participants from four speaker groups, each with different amounts and types of exposure to root-and-pattern morphology, to see whether performance on the artificial grammar is modulated by exposure.
Preliminary results from this research show that an artificial grammar employing root-and-pattern morphology is more difficult for native English speakers to learn than an artificial grammar employing concatenative morphology (similar to work by LaCross (2015) and Newport & Aslin (2004)). While English speakers must track other types of linguistic non-adjacent dependencies (e.g., syntactic non-adjacent dependencies, such as verb agreement or auxiliary agreement), they do not generally have to track phonological non-adjacent dependencies (such as vowel harmony) or morphological non-adjacent dependencies (such as roots and patterns). Arabic speakers more accurately learn the non-concatenative grammar, and are able to pick up on more fine-grained patterns than the English speakers are in the Wug Test.