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The markedness principle plays a central role in linguistic theory: marked grammatical categories (like plural) tend to receive more linguistic encoding (e.g., morphological marking), while unmarked categories (like singular) tend to receive less linguistic encoding. What precisely makes a grammatical category or meaning marked, however, remains unclear. One prominent proposal attributes markedness to the frequency or predictability of meanings: infrequent or less predictable meanings are more likely to receive extra linguistic encoding than frequent or more predictable meanings. Existing support for the predictability account is limited to correlational evidence, leaving open whether meaning predictability can cause markedness patterns. We present two miniature language learning experiments that directly assess effects of predictability on morphological plural marking. We find that learners preferentially …