Morphological cues as an aid to word learning: a cross-situational word learning study

Learning a language with complex morphology poses challenge to learners, especially adults, who may need acquire unfamiliar grammatical categories. One possible advantage languages is that the could provide cues word meaning. The hypothesis can bootstrap adult learning tested across four cross-situational experiments. Adult learners were exposed words from novel CVCV stems and -CV suffixes. In Experimental conditions, suffixes consistently mapped semantic categories (e.g. [-ke] for fruits). Control condition, did not any consistent information. Participants in conditions outperformed participants but only when there sufficient opportunities infer initial phases. These results highlight adults’ ability rapidly learn morphological information, use this information learning.