title: Social Salience Discriminates Learnability of Contextual Cues in an Artificial Language.
abstract: We investigate the learning of contextual meaning by adults in an artificial language. Contextual meaning here refers to the non-denotative contextual information that speakers attach to a linguistic construction. Through a series of short games, played online, we test how well adults can learn different contextual meanings for a word-formation pattern in an artificial language. We look at whether learning contextual meanings depends on the social salience of the context, whether our players interpret these contexts generally, and whether the learned meaning is generalized to new words. Our results show that adults are capable of learning contextual meaning if the context is socially salient, coherent, and interpretable. Once a contextual meaning is recognized, it is readily generalized to related forms and contexts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Archeology and Anthropology, University of BristolBristol, UK; New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour, University of CanterburyChristchurch, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Péter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rácz
authors.affiliation: New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour, University of CanterburyChristchurch, New Zealand; Department of Linguistics, University of CanterburyChristchurch, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Jennifer B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Hay
authors.affiliation: New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour, University of CanterburyChristchurch, New Zealand; Oxford e-Research Centre, University of OxfordOxford, UK; Department of Linguistics, Northwestern UniversityEvanston, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Janet B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Pierrehumbert
keywords: artificial language learning; experimental linguistics; indexicality; language variation and change; morphology; salience; sociolinguistics