Event Details

This event is co-organized by the Multilingualism and Cognition Research Group and the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C).

Investigating the loss of V2 with iconic artificial language learning

Marc Meisezahl (University of Konstanz)

English and many Romance languages share an interesting diachronic development in their syntax: the loss of verb second (V2; Fischer et al. 2001, Wolfe 2018). V2 languages are characterised by the obligatory placement of the finite verb in the second position of the clause, irrespective of the clause-initial constituent (Holmberg 2015). One property that unifies the changes in English and Romance is the rise of subject-initial sentences at the expense of non-subject-initial sentences. Building on evidence that variability fosters learning across domains (cf. Raviv, Lupyan & Green 2022), I investigate the hypothesis that reduced variability in clause- initial position negatively affects the learning of a V2 language. I report the results of an experiment employing a novel experimental paradigm – iconic artificial language learning (Shapiro & Steinert-Threlkeld 2023). In this paradigm, the artificial language is presented to participants as sequences of icons, rather than through the more typical written or auditory modalities. The results replicate previous experimental findings from a traditional artificial language learning study by Meisezahl, Kirby & Culbertson (2025), in so far as input variability indeed affects the successful learning of a V2 grammar. However, the results also suggest that the specific properties of the artificial language used by Meisezahl et al. (2025) likely contributed to the observed pattern. Broader implications for the loss of V2 as well as for artificial language learning more generally will be discussed.

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This is an internal talk of the Multilingualism and Cognition Research Group. Please join us in County South C89 or remotely via Teams. The link will be circulated via our mailing list.