With or Without a System: How Category-Specific and System-Wide Cognitive Biases Shape Word Order.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Psychology

Background:

• Language systems exhibit recurrent features, like head-dependent order (harmony).
• Some syntactic categories deviate from system-wide regularities.
• Adjective and genitive order relative to nouns lack a consistent typological tendency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test if category-specific ordering tendencies in syntax reflect underlying cognitive biases.
• To investigate biases favoring object-before-property and possession-before-possessor conceptual ordering.
• To explore the impact of these semantic biases on conventionalized syntax.

Main Methods:

• Two silent gesture experiments were conducted.
• Participants' gesture orders were analyzed in contexts with and without established linguistic systems.
• The study examined how cognitive biases influence ordering preferences.

Main Results:

• Cognitive biases were found to affect gesture order in novel contexts lacking conventionalized systems.
• When a conventionalized system was present, participants learned and adhered to it.
• Category-specific biases did not impede learning of established language systems.

Conclusions:

• Cognitive biases can influence language creation, particularly in the absence of established systems.
• Different contexts reveal distinct cognitive biases: some active during learning, others during language creation.
• Semantic biases in conceptual ordering may contribute to syntactic patterns like postnominal adjectives and prenominal genitives.