The Emergence of ESL Morphosyntax from Usage: Effects of Statistical Learning and Semantics

How are morphosyntactic systems seeded from usage? We investigated ESL learners’ productive morphology using Elicited Imitation of sentences containing trace exemplars stratify-sampled from large corpora. Morphemes are more accurately provided for lemmas to which they are (1) frequently and (2) reliably bound, suggesting both statistical and semantic motors of learning.