Partial phonological marking facilitates the acquisition of noun subclasses: A replication

This is a partial replication of Brooks, Braine, Catalano, Brody, and Sudha lter (1993). 32 participants learned a miniature linguistic system (MLS). V ocabulary of the MLS consisted of an actor subject, two sets of 19 object n ouns, and two sets of three suffixes. In the experimental language, 60% of the nouns were phonologically marked with a common ending for each class; i n the control, these endings were distributed across the classes. Participa nts were trained using pictures. Sentences about the pictures combined the actor's name with an object and an appropriate suffix that described the ac tor-object relation. A subset of possible sentences and objects was reserve d for later testing. During generalization tests, participants had to produ ce sentences for pictures they had not seen during training. The experiment al group was markedly superior to the control. The replication supports the earlier finding that learning of seemingly arbitrary linguistic classes ca n be facilitated by partial phonological cues.