Tuesday 19th November, 11-12.30, B21 7 George Square

The elimination of unpredictable variation is dependent on speaker identity

Olga Feher

Natural languages do not normally exhibit unpredictable variation, which is when an object is labelled by two or more words that are used interchangeably in a random manner. Synonyms are common but their use is usually conditioned on some social or contextual variable. Therefore, unpredictable variation is a good tool to study language evolution and learners’ biases. We trained participants on a miniature artificial language using a word learning task to test the effects of speaker identity on the elimination of unpredictable variation. The spoken input language contained two labels for each object presented, one label used twice as often as the other but the variation was distributed differently across 1-3 speakers. There were four conditions: in one, participants heard a single speaker name all objects; in the second condition 3 speakers named objects with variable usage; in the third condition 3 speakers used the labels categorically: two speakers using one label all the time and the third speaker using the other label consistently; and in the last condition is like the third with the odd label always used by the same “odd ball” speaker. We found that participants who received variable input from all the speakers tended to probability match, whereas when variation came from between speakers, participants were much more likely to regularise in their word recall. This can be due to conformity effects or learning the categorical behaviour of speakers.

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