Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report a series of artificial language learning experiments designed to test child and adult learners abilities to acquirethree types of phonological variation. Previous work on experimental morphology (Hudson Kam & Newport 2005, 2009;Schuler, Yang & Newport, 2016) has found that young children turn inconsistent input into an invariant rule, while adultsreproduce and match variation in their input. Here we investigate whether phonological variation of three different types(deterministic conditioning, unconditioned variation, and probabilistic variation) exhibits a similar age pattern. We finda clear effect of age in grammatically-conditioned variability, with the youngest children showing a strong tendency toregularize to the stem form, adults probability-matching, and intermediate-aged children learning correct conditioning butnot matching the input probabilities. These results suggest, in accord with previous findings on morphology, that variationis not readily learned by young children and may instead be acquired as a separate process.