Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, I present experimental data bearing on the controversial issue of the possible relationship between the frequency of language types and how easily they can be learnt. Using simple, artificial languages which only differ with respect to the properties we are interested in, I show that there does appear to be a relationship of some kind, although not as strong as one might have hoped. In particular, if a language type can be learnt relatively easily, then the models fail to predict its actual frequency in the real world. On the other hand, the connectionist models provide evidence that the language types which are unattested or highly infrequent are also impossible or hard to learn.