Cognitive Science Department, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
HAS-BME Momentum Language Acquisition Research Group, Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
Cogn Sci. 2024 Aug;48(8):e13483. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13483.
People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social context is less understood. We report on the results of an innovative experimental battery designed to test how learning variation is affected by a variable's social indexicality. Hungarian native speakers played a co-operative game involving verb nonwords. These were built on existing inflectional variation in Hungarian. Participant behavior shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, and this reflected a change in the overall lexical patterns of the players, affected by the particular verbs introduced by the co-player. Patterns persisted in subsequent testing. Learning was similar for variables with or without social meaning. Results show that participants can learn and retain a range of variable morphological patterns in a simulated interaction. Participants seem to have equal capacity to pick up variables with and without social meaning. This suggests that the social meaning of a pattern does not clearly constrain learning morphological variation and becomes relevant downstream in learning.
人们通过接触语言互动来学习语言变体。我们参与这些互动的方式受到词汇表达、语言处理机制和社会语境的影响。现有研究关注的是我们如何在环境语言中学习和存储变体。社会语境如何影响这一点还不太清楚。我们报告了一项创新实验的结果，该实验旨在测试学习变体会如何受到变量的社会索引的影响。匈牙利母语者参与了一个涉及动词非词的合作游戏。这些动词非词建立在匈牙利现有的屈折变化之上。参与者的行为会根据自动化合作玩家的偏好而发生变化，这反映了玩家的整体词汇模式发生了变化，受到合作玩家引入的特定动词的影响。在后续测试中，这些模式仍然存在。对于具有或不具有社会意义的变量，学习效果相似。结果表明，参与者可以在模拟互动中学习和保留一系列可变形态模式。参与者似乎具有相同的能力来学习具有和不具有社会意义的变量。这表明模式的社会意义并没有明显限制对形态变化的学习，并且在学习的下游才变得相关。
