Lexical and social effects on the learning and integration of inflectional morphology

People learn language variation through interactions influenced by lexical representations, processing mechanisms, and social context. An experimental study involving Hungarian speakers used a game with verb non-words based on Hungarian inflectional variation to investigate how social indexicality affects language learning. Participants adapted their lexical patterns to align with an automated co-player's preferences, maintaining these patterns over time, regardless of the social meaning of the variables. The findings suggest that social meaning does not significantly impact the initial learning of morphological variation but may play a role later in the learning process.