Social Salience Discriminates Learnability of Contextual Cues in an Artificial Language

Frontiers in Psychology

Péter Rácz¹ 

关键词: salience;    language variation and change;    experimental linguistics;    morphology;    indexicality;    sociolinguistics;    artificial language learning;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00051

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY