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{
    "pk": 28914,
    "title": "Acquiring Agglutinating and Fusional Languages Can Be Similarly Difficult:\nEvidence from an Adaptive Tracking Study",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Research on the acquisition of morphology commonly predicts\nthat agglutinating systems should be easier to learn than\nfusional systems. This is argued to be due to compositional\ntransparency: the mapping between morphemes and meanings\nis one-to-one in agglutinating systems, but not in fusional\nsystems. This is supported by findings in first and second\nlanguage learning (Goldschneider & DeKeyser 2001, Slobin\n1973), typology (Dressler 2003, Haspelmath & Michaelis\n2017), and language evolution (Brighton 2002). We present\nfindings from a series of artificial language learning\nexperiments which complicate this picture. First, we show that\nwhen only two features (e.g., NOUN CLASS and NUMBER) are\nmorphologically encoded, the learnability of fusional and\nagglutinating systems does not differ significantly. This\nfinding holds when learners are given an additional cue to\nmorpheme segmentation–which in principle should make the\nagglutinating system easier. However, the error patterns of the\ntwo groups provide some evidence that learners might have a\nbias for transparent structures. Our results suggest that the\nadvantages of agglutinating over fusional systems may be\noverstated, particularly when a small number of features are\nencoded. Since agglutinating systems likely bear additional\ncosts (e.g., segmentation, longer word length, and the online\ncost of mapping between morphemes and meanings), such\nsystems do not guarantee learning ease under all\ncircumstances.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "language acquisition; morphology; agglutinating;\nfusional; artificial language learning; transparency"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Poster Presentations",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/49z51258",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Svenja",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Wagner",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "The University of Edinburgh",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Kenny",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Smith",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "The University of Edinburgh",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Jennifer",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Culbertson",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "The University of Edinburgh",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2019-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28914/galley/18785/download/"
        }
    ]
}