School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne.
Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich.
Cogn Sci. 2022 Feb;46(2):e13107. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13107.
Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward category clustering is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one generation to the next if each inflectional category has a consistent morphological position. We test this in an online artificial language experiment, teaching adult English speakers a miniature language consisting of noun stems representing shapes and suffixes representing the color and number features of each shape. In one experimental condition, each suffix category has a fixed position, with color in the first position and number in the second position. In a second condition, each specific combination of suffixes has a fixed order, but some combinations have color in the first position, and some have number in the first position. In a third condition, suffixes are randomly ordered on each presentation. While the language in the first condition is consistent with the category clustering principle, those in the other conditions are not. Our results indicate that category clustering of inflectional affixes facilitates morphological learning, at least in adult English speakers. Moreover, we found that languages that violate category clustering but still follow fixed affix ordering patterns are more learnable than languages with random ordering. Altogether, our results provide evidence for individual biases toward category clustering; we suggest that this bias may play a causal role in shaping the typological regularities in affix order we find in natural language.
表达同一语法范畴的屈折词缀（例如，主语一致）往往出现在单词的相同形态位置。我们假设这种跨语言的范畴聚类趋势至少部分是学习偏差的结果，如果每个屈折范畴都有一个一致的形态位置，那么这种偏差有助于形态从一代传递到下一代。我们在一个在线人工语言实验中对此进行了测试，向成年英语使用者教授一种由表示形状的名词词干和表示每种形状颜色和数量特征的后缀组成的微型语言。在一个实验条件下，每个后缀类别都有一个固定的位置，颜色在第一位，数量在第二位。在第二个条件下，每个特定的后缀组合都有一个固定的顺序，但有些组合的颜色在第一位，有些组合的数量在第一位。在第三个条件下，后缀在每次呈现时都是随机排序的。虽然第一种条件下的语言与范畴聚类原则一致，但其他条件下的语言则不一致。我们的结果表明，屈折词缀的范畴聚类有助于形态学习，至少在成年英语使用者中是这样。此外，我们发现，违反范畴聚类但仍遵循固定词缀顺序模式的语言比具有随机顺序的语言更易于学习。总之，我们的结果为个体对范畴聚类的偏见提供了证据；我们认为，这种偏见可能在塑造自然语言中我们发现的词缀顺序的类型学规律方面发挥了因果作用。
