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Related Experiment Videos

Cross-linguistic regularities and learner biases reflect "core" mechanics.

Brent Strickland1,2, Emmanuel Chemla1,3

  • 1Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France.

Plos One
|January 12, 2018
PubMed
Summary

Humans instinctively understand mechanical object relationships, preferring them in language. This preference is reflected in shorter words for mechanical concepts like "in" and "on" across diverse languages.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Mechanical object relationships may capture attention more readily than non-mechanical ones.
  • Prior research in infant cognition and adult vision hints at the salience of mechanical interactions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if language reflects a human bias towards mechanical object relationships.
  • To explore how prepositions and adpositions encode mechanical versus non-mechanical interactions.

Main Methods:

  • Experiments 1 & 2: Adults inferred meanings of novel prepositions, testing for mechanical bias.
  • Experiments 3 & 4: Analyzed cross-linguistic adpositions (from machine and expert sources) for length differences related to mechanical properties.

Main Results:

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  • Adults preferentially assigned mechanical meanings to novel prepositions.
  • Across diverse languages, adpositions for mechanical containment ('in') and support ('on') were shorter than those for non-mechanical spatial relations.

Conclusions:

  • Language contains traces of fundamental cognitive representations.
  • Cross-linguistic patterns in adposition length offer insights into the non-linguistic thought processes underlying language.