Morphological cues as an aid to word learning: a cross-situational word learning study

Abstract

Learning a language with complex morphology poses a challenge to language learners, especially adults, who may need to acquire grammatical categories that do not exist in their native language.One possible advantage to languages with complex morphology, even for adult learners, is that morphology could provide cues to word meaning, particularly when referential uncertainty is high.The hypothesis that morphology can bootstrap adult word learning is tested across four crosssituational word learning experiments. Adult learners were exposed to words from a novel language with CVCV stems and -CV suffixes. In the Experimental conditions, the suffixes consistently mapped to semantic categories: fruit (/-ke/), animals (/-bu/), and vehicles (/-do/). In the Control condition, the suffixes did not provide any consistent semantic information.Participants in the Experimental conditions outperformed participants in the Control conditions on word learning tasks with high referential uncertainty, but only when there were sufficient opportunities to learn the morphology in the initial learning phases. These results highlight adults' ability to rapidly learn novel morphological information, and use this information in word learning.

What have we learned from 15 years of research on cross-situational word learning? A focused review

“…Different trial-by-trial characteristics like the amount of referential ambiguity (number of objects on the screen), number of to-be-learned words, how often each word is repeated, and the complexity of the word-object-mappings impact CSWL: Observed learning rate will be highest if there are only two visual referents on each screen and a small number of to-be learned one-to-one-mappings (i.e., each word maps onto one referent only) that are repeated often (e.g., Yu and Smith, 2007;Poepsel and Weiss, 2016;Roembke and McMurray, 2016). Some studies have combined the learning of cross-situational statistics with other cues, such as morphological (Finley, 2022) or social ones (Frank et al, 2013;MacDonald et al, 2017); these can facilitate how easy it is to learn or what type of information is encoded.…”