Unexpectedness makes a sociolinguistic variant easier to learn: An alien-language-learning experiment

Wei Lai, Péter Rácz, Gareth Roberts

Abstract: We report two artificial-language-learning experiments investigating if the acquisition of sociolinguistic associations is facilitated by two kinds of expectation violation: encountering a variant (a) for the first time or (b) in an ungrammatical context. Participants learned an artificial language with two dialects, each spoken by one of two alien species: Gulus and Norls. The two dialects differed with regard to a plural suffix: Gulus mostly used -dup, and Norls mostly used -nup. In the first learning phase, participants learned the language without aliens; in the second learning phase, they were exposed to it with alien interlocutors. In Experiment 1 we manipulated whether -nup occurred in the first learning phase; in Experiment 2 we manipulated linguistic constraints on its occurrence. The acquisition of sociolinguistic association was evaluated by asking participants to select suffixes given aliens and vice versa. We found that sociolinguistic acquisition was facilitated in Experiment 1, but not Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, however, a post hoc analysis revealed that participants who had learned the grammatical context of the linguistic conditioning did experience facilitation, while those who had not did not. Our results provide laboratory evidence that unexpectedness facilitates the learning of sociolinguistic variation.