With or Without a System
How Category‐Specific and System‐Wide Cognitive Biases Shape Word Order
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7150293 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Annie Holtz (0000-0002-4325-9931, Department of Linguistics and English Language The University of Edinburgh, corresponding author), Simon Kirby (0000-0002-6496-1340, Department of Linguistics and English Language The University of Edinburgh), Jennifer Culbertson (0000-0002-1737-6296, Department of Linguistics and English Language The University of Edinburgh) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 11 |
| Pages | e70139-e70139 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cognitive Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0364-0213 • E-ISSN: 1551-6709 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/cogs.70139 |
| PMID | 41305994 |
| OpenAlex | W4416786581 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 55 |
Certain recurrent features of language characterize the way a whole language system is structured. By contrast, others target specific categories of items within those wider systems. For example, languages tend to exhibit consistent order of heads and dependents across different phrases—a system‐wide regularity known as harmony. While this tendency is generally robust, some specific syntactic categories appear to deviate from the trend. We examine one such case, the order of adjectives and genitives, which do not exhibit a typological tendency for consistent order with respect to the noun. Instead, adjectives tend to follow and genitives precede the noun. Across two silent gesture experiments, we test the hypothesis that these category‐specific ordering tendencies reflect cognitive biases that favor (i) conveying objects before properties that modify them, but (ii) conveying expressions of possession before possessors. While our hypothesis is thus that these biases are semantic in nature—they impact preferences for how concepts are ordered—the claim is that they may have downstream effects on conventionalized syntax by contributing to an over‐representation of postnominal adjectives and prenominal genitives. We find that these biases affect gesture order in contexts where no conventionalized system is in place. When a system is in place, participants learn that system, and category‐specific biases do not impact their learning. Our results suggest that different contexts reveal distinct types of cognitive biases; some are active during learning and others are active during language creation
Cognition · Gesture · Syntax · Word order · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Language Development and Disorders · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Discourse Constraints on Syntactic Processing in Language Production
Word and World Order
Getting it right by getting it wrong
The emergence of grammar
Learning biases predict a word order universal
JsPsych
Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4
Nominal Word Order Typology in Signed Languages
Adjective position and referential efficiency in American Sign Language
Cross-linguistic patterns of morpheme order reflect cognitive biases
A learning bias for word order harmony
Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase
Phonetically natural rules benefit from a learning bias
Differential Object Marking
Towards an account of the possessive constructions
Animacy and grammatical variation—Findings from English genitive variation
Animacy Versus Weight as Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English
Learning Phonology With Substantive Bias
Animacy and egophoricity
Influence of predicate sense on word order in sign languages
On the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun
From the world to word order
Learning nonadjacent dependencies in phonology
The learning bias for cross-category harmony is sensitive to semantic similarity
The Greenbergian Word Order Correlations
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |