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Related Concept Videos

Language and Cognition01:27

Language and Cognition

Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.
Confirmation Biases01:31

Confirmation Biases

The confirmation bias is the tendency to focus on information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore information that is inconsistent with our expectations. For example, if you think that your professor is not very nice, you notice all of the instances of rude behavior exhibited by the professor while ignoring the countless pleasant interactions he is involved in on a daily basis. Have you ever fallen prey to the confirmation bias, either as the source or target of such bias?
Hindsight Biases01:12

Hindsight Biases

Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Can you relate this to the phrase "Hindsight is 20/20" now?
First Impression01:09

First Impression

First impressions play a crucial role in social perception, shaping how individuals assess others in professional, academic, and interpersonal contexts. Psychological research highlights the significance of cognitive biases, such as the primacy and recency effects, which influence how people interpret and recall information.The Primacy Effect and Cognitive AnchoringThe primacy effect describes the tendency for initial information to impact judgment disproportionately. When individuals encounter...
Correspondence Bias01:17

Correspondence Bias

Correspondence bias, also referred to as the fundamental attribution error, describes the tendency to attribute another person’s behavior to internal characteristics rather than situational influences. This cognitive bias leads individuals to overlook external factors that may be influencing actions, thereby fostering potentially inaccurate assessments of others’ intentions and dispositions.Empirical Evidence for Correspondence BiasResearch has consistently demonstrated the prevalence of...
The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic01:25

The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic

In order to make good decisions, we use our knowledge and our reasoning. Often, this knowledge and reasoning is sound and solid. However, sometimes, we are swayed by biases or by others manipulating a situation. For example, let’s say you and three friends wanted to rent a house and had a combined target budget of $1,600. The realtor shows you only very run-down houses for $1,600 and then shows you a very nice house for $2,000. Might you ask each person to pay more in rent to get the $2,000...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 26, 2026

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
05:15

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition

Published on: February 19, 2018

Learning biases predict a word order universal.

Jennifer Culbertson1, Paul Smolensky, Géraldine Legendre

  • 1Cognitive Science Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. jculbertson@bcs.rochester.edu

Cognition
|January 3, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Learners exposed to diverse language systems develop biases reflecting a known word-order universal. This finding offers new empirical evidence for how linguistic universals emerge from language diversity.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Psycholinguistics

Background:

  • Linguistic diversity presents a challenge to understanding universal grammar.
  • Previous theories assumed innate constraints on language acquisition, but empirical evidence is needed to link typology to learner biases.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how learners' biases relate to linguistic universals.
  • To test if artificial language learning can reveal the origins of cross-linguistic word-order preferences.

Main Methods:

  • Adult subjects learned an artificial language with mixed grammatical systems.
  • An artificial language learning paradigm simulated linguistic change.
  • Learner biases were analyzed in relation to word-order universals.

Main Results:

  • Learner biases mirrored Joseph Greenberg's proposed word-order universal.
  • This universal constrains the ordering of adjectives, numerals, and nouns.
  • A probabilistic model supported the observed learning biases.

Conclusions:

  • Learner biases play a crucial role in the emergence of linguistic universals.
  • Findings challenge assumptions in generative linguistics regarding language acquisition faculty.
  • Results provide empirical support for the origins of cross-linguistic word-order preferences.