{"pk":30135,"title":"Do children preferentially mark unpredictable material? The case of optional plural\nmarking","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Speakers tend to assign more linguistic material to less\npredictable elements. This tendency is typically explained by\na bias for an efficient trade-off between production effort and\nunderstandability and is claimed to shape linguistic structures\nacross languages. Recent work suggests this trade-off enters\nthe linguistic system through learning processes with learners\ndeviating from their input by increasing marking for less\npredictable elements. However, no study to date has tested\nwhether child learners also show such predictability-based\nmarking, an important gap seeing that children are the\nprimary learners in real-life language acquisition. A recent\nstudy showed that adults increase predictability-based\nmarking of an optional-plural marker, in line with\ncommunicative efficiency. Here, we ask if children show a\nsimilar pattern. Results show that children, unlike adults, do\nnot show an efficient trade-off in their productions. We\ndiscuss implications for the role of different language learners\non language change.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"optional morphology; artificial language learning;\nlanguage acquisition; language evolution"}],"section":"Papers accepted as Talks, appearing in proceedings only","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/56b3z241","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Shira","middle_name":"","last_name":"Tal","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Hebrew University of Jerusalem","department":""},{"first_name":"Inbal","middle_name":"","last_name":"Arnon","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Hebrew University of Jerusalem","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/30135/galley/19989/download/"}]}