Word order universals reflect cognitive biases: Evidence from silent gesture and corpus statistics
Marieke Schouwstra, Simon Kirby, & Jenny Culbertson (Edinburgh)
Tuesday 18 April 2017, 11:00–12:30
1.17 Dugald Stewart Building
We investigate a hypothesized cognitive bias for isomorphic mappings between conceptual structure and linear order in the noun phrase. This bias has been proposed as a possible explanation for a striking asymmetry in the typology of the noun phrase – linear orders which place the adjective closest to the noun, then the numeral, then the demonstrative, are over-represented in the world’s languages.
Previous experimental work has provided evidence that an isomorphism bias affects English-speaking learners’ inferences about the relative order of modifiers in an artificial language. Here, we use the silent gesture paradigm to explore whether the isomorphism bias influences spontaneous gestures innovated by participants in a modality with which they have relatively little prior experience. We find that gesture order largely conforms to the same striking pattern found in noun phrase typology, supporting the role of the isomorphism bias in shaping the emergence of language (and language-like) systems.
Having shown that spontaneous production of gestures reveals a bias for isomorphism with conceptual structure we are left with an important question about the source of this bias. Is it “imposed by the nature of the human language capacity” as Adger (2017) suggests, or is this bias a result of a domain general constraint for simplicity interacting with a conceptual structure that is in principle learnable by the child from the structure of the world? To test this, we present preliminary results of an investigation of the relationships between objects, properties, numerosity, and locations using corpus statistics.