Tuesday 25th November 11am, DSB 1.17

Alan Nielsen

Motivated vs conventional systematicity: Implications for language learning.

Two complementary streams of research in the past decade have suggested that systematic associations between words and meanings are beneficial for language learners. On the one hand, work into sound symbolism has suggested that the motivated connections between certain characteristics of words and meanings are responsible for this learning benefit. At the same time, artificial language learning work has more generally suggested that systematic languages are easier to learn. In this talk I will present data from an experiment designed to explore the differences between these types of learning, suggesting that the sole benefit for motivated systematic languages over conventional ones is in the earliest stages of learning.

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