The present study explores the effects of frequency in
learning to parse novel morphological patterns. In two
experiments, suffixes were divided into three classes: high,
medium and low frequency, based on the proportion of stems
in the input that each suffix attached to (high frequency =
12/12, medium frequency = 6/12, and low frequency = 2/12).
In Experiment 1, learners were better at segmenting words
containing high frequency suffixes compared to low
frequency suffixes, even when the stems were novel. In
Experiment 2, token frequency was controlled for across all
three suffix frequency classes, but learners were still better at
segmenting high frequency suffixes, even when words
containing high frequency suffixes were less frequent. These
results suggest that learners are sensitive to the frequency
distributions of the morphemes in their language, supporting
work suggesting that a Zipfian distribution may be ideal for
language learning