Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Variation in inflectional morphology across languages raises questions about the factors affecting their learnability. This study explores the effects of two suggested factors: the implicative structure of the paradigm and the distribution of forms within it, and how they interact to affect the learnability of the system. Our results from a human behavioral study and artificial neural network simulations suggest that these factors influence learning, though type frequency may only serve as a proxy for the effects of token frequency.