22.03.2022 Carmen Saldana

Despite the astonishing variation that morphological structure displays cross-linguistically, there are certain patterns that reappear across many languages and others that are very rare or even unattested. My research focuses on exploring whether these cross-linguistic asymmetries can be explained by shared features of human cognitive systems. In this talk, I will present a series of artificial language learning studies which aim to test this hypothesised link in morphological structure both at the syntagmatic (i.e., morpheme order) and paradigmatic level (e.g., structure of inflectional paradigms). I will focus in particular on two cross-linguistic tendencies: 1) affixes that belong to the same category tend to be linearly placed in the same position, and those with stronger (structural) relationships to the stem tend to appear closer; and  2) patterns of syncretism and syntagmatic splits in inflectional paradigms tend to reflect more natural partitions of the morphosemantic space. The results from the studies I will present suggest that these regularities across the languages of the world may be shaped by universal features of human cognition during language learning and transmission.