Tripartitions of the first person space (English speakers, Condition 1)

The first person space can be thought of as covering all possible groups of individuals that include the speaker of the conversational context. Research on the typology of person systems suggests that languages carve-up this space by making use of features, which are smaller than the groupings or categories themselves. For example, a language that makes use of a ±addressee person feature will distinguish pronouns as a function of whether their reference includes both speaker and addressee, or the speaker but not the addressee. Similarly, a language that makes use of only a number distinction (such as ±atomic) will just differentiate between a pronoun that refers to the speaker alone and a pronoun that refers to the speaker plus any others (e.g., English). Person and number features can also be combined. Languages like Tamil make an ±atomic contrast on top of the clusivity distinction, and have three first person pronominal forms. Previous work (Maldonado & Culbertson 2019, Maldonado & Culbertson, to appear) investigated whether English-speaking learners differentiate between alternative bipartitions of the first person space as defined by homophony (i.e., two-way person systems). Besides having a strong bias for first person paradigms that resemble their native language, English learners were shown to prefer systems that feature person homophony over those that feature number homophony. We interpreted this as a consequence of the fact that their native-language makes no clusivity distinction, so participants show a bias against systems that only make such distinction. In this experiment, we aim at testing whether English-speaking learners distinguish different tripartitions of the first person space, where three pronominal forms are used to cover the first person space. We will use the same artificial language learning methodology used in Maldonado & Culbertson (2019) to test whether English speakers continue to prefer person homophony over other patterns when they are learning a first person tripartition.