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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 5, 2025

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning

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Published on: January 29, 2020

From improvisation to learning: How naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution.

Yasamin Motamedi¹, Lucie Wolters¹, Danielle Naegeli²

¹Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh, UK.

|July 10, 2022

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Cognitive biases influence word order preferences, with a natural tendency for event-specific orders (SOV/SVO). Learning systematic patterns competes with this bias, yet semantically-conditioned word order variability is expected to persist.

Keywords:

Language evolution Learning Naturalness Silent gesture Systematicity Word order

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Linguistics
Psychology

Background:

Silent gesture studies explore cognitive biases in cross-linguistic word order.
Previous research suggested SOV/SVO orders correlate with extensional/intensional events, respectively.

Purpose of the Study:

Investigate ordering preferences for SOV and SVO orders.
Examine how learning influences these preferences in the absence and presence of conventions.
Model the persistence of word order patterns in cultural transmission.

Main Methods:

Online forced-choice experiment with English-speaking participants.
Two conditions: absence of conventions and learning event-order mappings with varying frequencies.
Computational modeling of cultural transmission.

Main Results:

Natural ordering preferences for SOV/SVO based on event semantics were confirmed.
Learning increased preference for systematic order patterns.
Systematic learning competed with natural, semantically-conditioned ordering preferences.

Conclusions:

Human language exhibits natural ordering preferences influenced by event semantics.
Learning can lead to systematic word orders but does not fully eliminate semantic conditioning.
Semantically-conditioned word order variability is likely to persist across generations in languages.