Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Morphological syncretism occurs in languages when one morphological category ‘merges’ with another. Cross-linguistic research on the prevalence and types of syncretic patterns has revealed that some types of syncretism are more common than others. For example, syncretism in nominal morphology is more likely to occur in non-singular categories (Baerman et al., 2005). In two artificial language learning experiments, participants were exposed to words from a miniature language with suffix markings for gender (feminine and masculine) and number (singular, dual, and plural). Participants in Experiment 1 showed no evidence of a bias for syncretism in non-singular forms. However, participants in Experiment 2 showed a general bias to infer that a suffix that marked a novel category should be identical to a known form. This bias was strongest for non-singular items, in line with the cross-linguistic typology of syncretism. Implications for learnability and typology are discussed.