People can learn default patterns even when they are infrequent (2023)

Undergraduate: Esther Chen

Faculty Advisor: Katya Pertsova
Department: Linguistics

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The present study examines how people learn language patterns involving plural suffixes. In languages with multiple plural suffixes, there may be a “default” suffix that speakers automatically resort to except when there are exceptions. Default suffixes usually occur with a wide word class, while groups of exceptions occur with narrow word classes (e.g., limited to certain word endings). Oftentimes, the default suffix occurs more frequently than the exceptions. However, it is also possible to have a “minority default,” which occurs more infrequently than the exceptions. The present study examined how well learners would be able to identify the default suffix when it occurred at the same frequency as the exceptional suffixes (control condition) and when it occurred more infrequently (experimental condition). The results show that participants learned the default equally well in both situations. Therefore, people can still learn default patterns even when they are infrequent.

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