Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The expressive power of natural languages depends on their regular compositional structure, which allows us to express and understand an infinite set of messages. However, a complete model of language evolution should also account for irregular exceptions to regular rules, common in natural languages. Historical linguistics has established a correlation between irregularity and frequency in language use, which has been attributed to preferential irregularisation of frequent items, or preferential regularisation of infrequent items. In an iterated learning experiment where participants learn and reproduce a miniature language across multiple generations, we show that this correlation can be explained by the relationship between frequency, regularity and learnability, without needing to appeal to frequency-dependent irregularisation. We find that systems of plural marking regularise across generations of transmission, but that high-frequency items remain irregular. Our results further show that the persistence of irregularity is due to high frequency overriding pressures which normally reduce learnability, such as low generalisability of the inflectional strategy (suppletion is disfavoured except in high frequency items) and low type frequency (belonging to a small inflectional class is disfavoured except in high frequency items).