Segmentation of root and pattern morphology

Morphology is the study of how form and meaning are combined to form complex words. While previous studies of morphology learning rely on semantic associations of continuous affixes (e.g., prefixes and suffixes), the present study focuses on the learnability of non-continuous (non-concatenative) forms, without the use of semantic information. We performed three artificial grammar learning experiments testing the types of information that adult, English speaking learners can extract from hearing words made up of CCC ‘roots’. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to 24 CVCVC words made up of 12 CCC roots and four VV residues, repeated 15 times. In Experiments 2 and 3 the number of CCC items was increased to 72 (repeated five times), but with four additional templates (e.g., CVCCV in addition to CVCVC) in Experiment 2, and the addition of a prefix in Experiment 3. The results were parallel across all three experiments: participants could readily identify familiar items compared to both ungrammatical and novel grammatical items, and could correctly identify novel words compared to ungrammatical items, but only when the ungrammatical item was sufficiently different from the items heard in training. These results suggest that while learners can extract discontinuous information from lexical items, learners rely heavily on their memory for these lexical items, suggesting a possible bias against learning non-concatenative morphology.