Is Regularization Uniform across Linguistic Levels? Comparing Learning and Production of Unconditioned Probabilistic Variation in Morphology and Word Order

Abstract

Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it – removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use on context. Previous studies using artificial language learning experiments have documented regularizing behavior in the learning of lexical, morphological, and syntactic variation. These stud Show more