@article{d72f409c78604bba935ad4d9b7f076bc,
title = "Are non-native speakers the drivers of morphological simplification? A Wug experiment on the Dutch past tense system",
abstract = "It has often been suggested that there is an inverse correlation between the number of adult non-native speakers in a language and its morphological complexity. Secluded languages often show more complex morphology, while high-contact languages go through more severe simplifications throughout the ages. One such simplification linked to language contact is the regularization of the Germanic past tense. Yet, a Wug task on the English past tense system by Cuskley et al. (2015) showed that non-native speakers tend to use the irregular past tense even more than native speakers. In this paper, we replicate the Wug experiment for Dutch. Our results show similar evidence for a higher rate of irregularization across non-native speakers. Furthermore, we do not find any other simplification strategies among non-native speakers. Though caution is warranted, these converging results may suggest that non-native speakers are not the drivers of morphological simplification.",
keywords = "Dutch, language variation and change, language learning, language contact",
author = "{De Smet}, Isabeau and Laura Rosseel and {Van de Velde}, Freek",
year = "2022",
language = "English",
volume = "7",
pages = "224--245",
journal = "Journal of Language Evolution",
issn = "2058-4571",
publisher = "Oxford Journals",
number = "2",
}