Jennifer Culbertson
Centre for Language Evolution
University of Edinburgh

Dr. Culbertson will be joining us virtually on Zoom at 10:15am, but we will be gathering in the seminar room to listen and discuss! We’ll be having lunch in the Department Library at noon following Dr. Culbertson’s talk.

Evidence for the suffixing preference across diverse language populations

In this talk, I will discuss new psycholinguistic evidence about the so-called suffixing preference. Early work in linguistic typology identified this preference—for suffixation over prefixation for inflectional morphology—in a relatively small convenience sample of languages (e.g., Greenberg 1963, Cutler et al. 1985, Hawkins & Cutler 1988). More systematic work since then has complexified the picture to some degree. For example, Bybee et al. (1990) showed that the order of an affix is often predictable from the position of the source element from which it grammaticalised. Dryer (1992) showed that the degree of suffixation preference depends on the type of affix. Guzmán Naranjo & Becker (2021) showed that the suffixing preference differs substantially across linguistic macro areas. At the same time, researchers have continued to discuss explanations for the suffixing preference, typically relating it to the importance of word beginnings in (speech) perception (e.g., Cutler et al. 1985, Hupp et al. 2009, St. Claire et al. 2009). However, most psycholinguistic work on this topic has implicitly generalised word identification and sequence perception behavior from English speakers, to humans. This implicit generalisation from a single population, often English, is not extraordinary in psycholinguistics more narrowly, or in psychology more broadly (Henrich et al. 2010, Blasi et al. 2022). But in this case, the problem is particularly serious, since English speakers have a lifetime of experience with a suffixing language, and with the prominence of word beginnings as carriers of lexical information. I will present a series of experiments exploring sequence perception across populations, comparing English speakers’ behavior with the behavior of speakers of a heavily prefixing language (Kîîtharaka) and two languages with little affixation (Cantonese and Mandarin). I will discuss what the results of these experiments can tell us about the origins of the suffixing-preference in typology.