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

Abstract

ABSTRACT Learning a language with complex morphology poses a challenge to language learners, especially adults, who may need to acquire unfamiliar grammatical categories. One possible advantage to languages with complex morphology is that the morphology could provide cues to word meaning. The hypothesis that morphology can bootstrap adult word learning is tested across four cross-situational 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 (e.g. [-ke] for fruits). In the Control condition, the suffixes did not provide any consistent semantic information. Participants in the Experimental conditions outperformed participants in the Control conditions, but only when there were sufficient opportunities to infer 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.