The role of morphology in phonotactically-supported alternation learning

Abstract

The current study investigates whether morphological learning interacts with the link between phonotactics and alternations in artificial grammar learning. English speakers learned artificial languages with varying phonotactic support for a backness harmony plural alternation. Prior to learning the alternation, two groups were additionally trained on a non-alternating suffix that differed in function across two experiments. Contrary to previous findings, phonotactic support did not facilitate alternation learning across any conditions. The results also showed that exposure to the non-alternating suffix prior to the alternation impeded learning when the morpheme function was difficult to learn, but not when it was easily learned. These results suggest that the facilitative role of phonotactic support seen in previous studies is not robust across all experimental designs and that additional morphological knowledge can inhibit, rather than facilitate, alternation learning in artificial grammar learning.