Abstract
In an artificial language experiment, participants were taught two different artificial languages consisting of English content words and novel morphological marking. The first of the languages had matching alignment in both case and agreement, as attested in natural languages such as Basque, Belhare and Tsez. The other language combined accusative case alignment with ergative agreement alignment, a combination which is apparently unattested amongst natural languages. There was no significant difference between the languages in terms of the proportion of participants that showed awareness of the agreement pattern, nor in the ability of aware participants to recall case markers and inflections during training, or select the correct verb inflection in the generation post-test. However, amongst participants who remained unaware of the agreement pattern there was a significant difference in recall of verb inflections and case markers during the exposure phase task – recall was more accurate in the (attested) language with matching case and agreement alignment than the (nonattested) language in which case and agreement alignment were unmatched. We take this as evidence that there is a cognitive bias against the unattested non-matching alignment, reflected in implicit learning.
Highlights
Languages are free to index syntactic relations via either head or dependent marking (Nichols 1986)
The present study aims to make a direct comparison of the learnability of two types of language – one in which there is ergativity in both the case and verbal agreement system, and one in which the case system follows the accusative pattern whilst the verbal agreement system follows the ergative pattern
5.1 Verbal report With regard to verb inflection, in order to be classed as “aware” the participant had to report that the verb agreed with the object in transitives but with the subject in intransitives. For case marking they had to realise in ERGERG that the agent/patient case marker changed according to type of sentence
Summary
Languages are free to index syntactic relations via either head or dependent marking (Nichols 1986). We refer to head-marking as (verbal) agreement and dependent m arking as (nominal) case, without making any theoretical commitments as to the status of these phenomena. We seek to use an artificial language experiment to test the relative learnability of the (rare but attested) matching ergative-ergative alignment vs the (apparently unattested) non-matched accusative case and ergative agreement alignment. Our results show that amongst unaware participants, there is a significant difference in recall of the attested vs the unattested patterns in the training phase of our experiment. This suggests a cognitive bias against this unattested alignment
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