Structural priming in artificial languages and the regularisation of unpredictable variation

Olga Fehér,Kenny Smith,Elizabeth Wonnacott

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2016.06.002

Abstract

We present a novel experimental technique using artificial language learning to investigate the relationship between structural priming during communicative interaction, and linguistic regularity. We use unpredictable variation as a test-case, because it is a well-established paradigm to study learners’ biases during acquisition, transmission and interaction. We trained participants on artificial languages exhibiting unpredictable variation in word order, and subsequently had them communicate using these artificial languages. We found evidence for structural priming in two different grammatical constructions and across human-human and human-computer interaction. Priming occurred regardless of behavioral convergence: communication led to shared word order use only in human-human interaction, but priming was observed in all conditions. Furthermore, interaction resulted in the reduction of unpredictable variation in all conditions, suggesting a role for communicative interaction in eliminating unpredictable variation. Regularisation was strongest in human-human interaction and in a condition where participants believed they were interacting with a human but were in fact interacting with a computer. We suggest that participants recognize the counter-functional nature of unpredictable variation and thus act to eliminate this variability during communication. Furthermore, reciprocal priming occurring in human-human interaction drove some pairs of participants to converge on maximally regular, highly predictable linguistic systems. Our method offers potential benefits to both the artificial language learning and the structural priming fields, and provides a useful tool to investigate communicative processes that lead to language change and ultimately language design.

Highlights

All human languages exhibit a shared set of organizing principles or structural properties, sometimes known as design features (Hockett, 1960)
Our results indicate that classic techniques from developmental and psycholinguistic traditions – artificial language learning, scripted and unscripted interaction – can profitably be combined, with substantial potential benefits to both fields
We have combined these techniques here to demonstrate structural priming in two artificial language learning paradigms, and to explore the effects of interaction on unpredictably variable linguistic systems

Summary

Introduction

All human languages exhibit a shared set of organizing principles or structural properties, sometimes known as design features (Hockett, 1960). Combining experimental paradigms from two distinct fields (unpredictable variation and structural priming) offers substantial potential benefits to both: artificial language learning methods offer psycholinguists complete control over participants’ linguistic experience prior to interaction, and can in principle be used to probe representations of any structural feature of interest, including those absent from participants’ natural language (or from any natural language). Methods from priming provide the artificial language learning community with a powerful tool to study the representations that participants form during learning novel linguistic input. Our focus in this paper is on using this method to explore how utterance-by-utterance processes of priming, alignment and convergence in language use might shape the structure of linguistic systems, taking unpredictable linguistic variation as a test-case for exploring the relationship between language learning, language use, and language design. We looked for (1) regularisation (during recall 1, interaction, or recall 2), which would be evidenced by a reduction in the variability of the artificial language (as indexed by, e.g., over-production of the majority word order, or a reduction in the total entropy of the language), and (2) structural priming during interaction, which would be evidenced by a tendency to reuse the word order used by their interlocutor (Glermi, their alien language tutor) in the immediately preceding trial

Method

Results

Conclusions