Tuesday 17th, 11-12.30, Room 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

Input variability as a mechanism for social structure determination of linguistic complexity

Mark Atkinson

Abstract: While non-linguistic features of a speech community have been shown to correlate with degrees of linguistic complexity, the explanatory mechanism(s) by which they could have such an influence has not yet been convincingly identified. Currently the most popular explanation appeals to the differences between adult and child learning. Larger languages, for example, are thought to attract higher proportions of non-native speakers, who then simplify their language through greater levels of analysis and learning error.

This is not the only possible explanation, however, and I will present the results from a recent experiment which finds support for the alternative candidate mechanism of input variability. 20 participants were trained on a morphologically-complex miniature language in two conditions: one in which aural input was provided by a single native speaker, and another in which they received their input from three speakers. Despite the training data being identical in both conditions, learners in the single-speaker condition demonstrated a more successful acquisition of the morphological system. As other aspects of the target language were learned equally well in both conditions, it does not appear that lower levels of input variability simply aid language acquisition in general.

This difference in performance between the conditions appears to be due to the participants learning their training data in systematically different ways. There are indications that the multiple-speaker condition promoted the more holistic learning of the training data utterances, so reducing the learners’ ability to generalise. I will describe the evidence for this and offer some possible explanations, before finally discussing some options for future research.

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