The Importance of Temporal Information for Inflection-type Effects in Linguistic and Non-linguistic Domains

One of the important tasks of language acquisition is the ability to distinguish between an inflectional derivation from a target word, which is a variant of this word (e.g., tool tools), and a completely new word (e.g., tool stool). In an attempt to explain the ability to solve this problem, it has been proposed that the beginning of the word is its most psychologically salient portion. However, it is not clear whether this phenomenon is specific to language or whether it stems from a more general cognitive mechanism, with beginnings of sequences being more salient than endings. The three reported experiments were designed to answer this question. In these experiments, participants judged the similarity of test sequences to target sequences across three domains: linguistic, musical and visual. The test items were judged as more similar to an original target item if information was added to the end of that item rather than to the beginning of the item across all three domains. This suggests that there may be a more general cognitive mechanism underlying the well-documented suffixation preference, according to which changes in the end of the word are more readily interpreted as inflectional derivations from the target word.