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What is the connection between the cultural evolution of a language and the rapid processing response to that language in the brains of individual learners? In an iterated communication study that was conducted previously, participants were asked to communicate temporal concepts such as "tomorrow," "day after," "year," and "past" using vertical movements recorded on a touch screen. Over time, participants developed simple artificial 'languages' that used space metaphorically to communicate in nuanced ways about time. Some conventions appeared rapidly and universally (e.g., using larger vertical movements to convey greater temporal durations). Other conventions required extensive social interaction and exhibited idiosyncratic variation (e.g., using vertical location to convey past or future). Here we investigate whether the brain's response during acquisition of such a language reflects the process by which the language's conventions originally evolved. We recorded participants' EEG as they learned one of these artificial space-time languages. Overall, the brain response to this artificial communication system was language-like, with, for instance, violations to the system's conventions eliciting an N400-like component. Over the course of learning, participants' brain responses developed in ways that paralleled the process by which the language had originally evolved, with early neural sensitivity to violations of a rapidly-evolving universal convention, and slowly developing neural sensitivity to an idiosyncratic convention that required slow social negotiation to emerge. This study opens up exciting avenues of future work to disentangle how neural biases influence learning and transmission in the emergence of structure in language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the competitive exclusion principle (Gause, 1934), competition for the same niche must eventually lead one competitor to extinction or the occupation of a new niche. This principle applies in both biology and the cultural evolution of language, where different words and structures compete for the same function or meaning (Aronoff, 2016). Across languages, for example, word order trades off with case marking as a means of indicating who did what to whom in a sentence. Previous experimental work has shed light on how such trade-offs come about as languages adapt to human biases through learning and production, with biases becoming amplified through iterated learning over generations. At the same time, a large body of work has documented the impact of social biases on language change. However, little work has investigated how social biases interact with learning and production biases. In particular, the social dimension of language may provide alternative niches for otherwise redundant forms, preventing or slowing their extinction. We tested this hypothesis in an iterated-learning experiment in which participants were exposed to a language with two dialects, both of which had fixed word order, but differed in whether they employed case markers. In one condition, we biased participants socially towards speakers of the dialect that employed case; in other conditions we provided no bias, or biased participants for or against the dialect without case. As expected under our hypothesis, the use of case markers declined over time in all conditions, but the social bias in favor of case-dialect speakers slowed the decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While variation occurs in both phonology and morphosyntax, phonological variation also includes phonetic variation motivated by articulatory or perceptual factors. While learning in both domains is subject to cognitive biases, phonological learning may also be biased by physical factors, which may enhance learnability of phonetically motivated alternations. This study aims to identify whether learning differs when children are exposed to phonological or morphosyntactic patterns with equal complexity. Cantonese-speaking children learned an artificial language involving rounding harmony, where unround [e] or round [o] harmonizes with the following noun, or gender agreement, with feminine and masculine allomorphs lo ~ le. Patterns applied variably in 67% of training items, or categorically. Children were tested on generalization to novel stems. In the categorical learning conditions, participants showed comparable rates of harmony/agreement. In the variable phonological learning conditions, application of harmony exceeded the rate of exposure in training, suggesting the influence of a bias toward phonetically grounded rounding harmony. In the variable morphosyntactic condition, participants applied agreement below the rate of exposure. This finding points to a qualitative difference between learning in the two domains, with phonological (but not morphosyntactic) learning influenced by substantive grounding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We test the learnability of evidentials using Artificial Language Learning methods. • Cross-linguistically prevalent evidential distinctions are learned more easily. • Same patterns occur when non-linguistic symbols encode evidential meanings. • We propose that pragmatic pressures explain the learnability patterns observed. Cross-linguistically prevalent semantic distinctions are widely assumed to be easier to learn because they reflect natural concepts. Here we propose an alternative, pragmatic perspective that links both the cross-linguistic prevalence and the learnability of semantic distinctions to communicative pressures. We focus on evidentiality (the encoding of the speaker's information source). Across languages, grammatical evidential systems are more likely to encode indirect sources (especially, reported information) compared to direct sources (e.g., visual perception). On a conceptual account, this seems puzzling, since humans reason naturally about how seeing connects to knowing. On a pragmatic account, however, the predominant encoding of the speaker's reportative compared to visual information sources can be explained in terms of informativeness (visual access is ubiquitous and potentially more reliable, hence less marked). We tested the pragmatic account in four experiments. Adult English speakers exposed to novel miniature evidential morphological systems consistently showed higher learning rates for systems with a single indirect (reportative) compared to a single direct (visual) evidential morpheme (Experiment 1). This pattern persisted even when participants were given specific cues to the target meanings (Experiment 2) and partly extended to cases where evidential meanings were conveyed through visual, not linguistic, means (Experiment 3). It also persisted when the evidential morphemes had to be learned from different materials (Experiment 4). We conclude that the cross-linguistic bias to mark reportative/indirect over visual/direct sources of information has pragmatic roots that also shape the learnability of evidential semantic distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people learn to use language in creative but constrained ways? Experiment 1 investigates linguistic creativity by exposing adult participants to two novel word order constructions that differ in terms of their semantics: One construction exclusively describes actions that have a strong effect; the other construction describes actions with a weaker but otherwise similar effect. One group of participants witnessed novel verbs only appearing in one construction or the other, while another group witnessed a minority of verbs alternating between constructions. Subsequent production and judgment results demonstrate that participants in both conditions extended and accepted verbs in whichever construction best described the intended message. Unlike related previous work, this finding is not naturally attributable to prior knowledge of the likely division of labor between verbs and constructions or to a difference in cue validity. In order to investigate how speakers learn to constrain generalizations, Experiment 2 includes one verb (out of 6) that was witnessed in a single construction to describe both strong and weak effects, essentially statistically preempting the use of the other construction. In this case, participants were much more lexically conservative with this verb and other verbs, while they nonetheless displayed an appreciation of the distinct semantics of the constructions with new novel verbs. Results indicate that the need to better express an intended message encourages generalization, while statistical preemption constrains generalization by providing evidence that verbs are restricted in their distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the shorter it tends to be. He claimed that this "Law of Abbreviation" is a universal structural property of language. The Law of Abbreviation has since been documented in a wide range of human languages, and extended to animal communication systems and even computer programming languages. Zipf hypothesised that this universal design feature arises as a result of individuals optimising form-meaning mappings under competing pressures to communicate accurately but also efficiently-his famous Principle of Least Effort. In this study, we use a miniature artificial language learning paradigm to provide direct experimental evidence for this explanatory hypothesis. We show that language users optimise form-meaning mappings only when pressures for accuracy and efficiency both operate during a communicative task, supporting Zipf's conjecture that the Principle of Least Effort can explain this universal feature of word length distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning noun classification systems, like gender, involves inferring a language-particular set of (often probabilistic) cues to class membership. Previous work has shown that learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues (e.g., Gagliardi & Lidz, 2014; Karmiloff-Smith, 1981). Surprisingly, this occurs even when competing semantic cues are more reliable predictors of class. We investigate two possible explanations for this: first, that phonological cues are more salient to learners than semantic cues, and second that phonological cues are generally available earlier than semantic cues. We show that adult learners' treatment of conflicting cues to noun class in a miniature artificial language depends on both cue saliency and early availability. Importantly, learners prioritize earlieravailable cues even when they are less salient than competitor cues. Our findings suggest a possible mechanism for children's over-reliance on phonology: children start building their classifications systems very early, when phonological information is available, but word meanings are not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguists from across sub-disciplines have noted that congruence (i.e., form-function mapping) across languages in contact seems to affect acquisition and play a role in language emergence (e.g. Creole genesis). However, because congruence is often confounded with other variables (e.g., frequency, language type, speakers' proficiency levels, perceptual salience, semantic transparency), it remains unclear whether congruence per se benefits learners. In this paper, we provide an experimental test of the effects of congruence on acquisition through an artificial language-learning experiment involving English (L1) and two artificial languages (Flugerdu and Zamperese). English-speakers who identified as "native" (i.e., first-language) speakers (N = 163) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, varying which of the three languages expressed negation with congruent forms: all three languages; only Flugerdu and Zamperese; only English and Flugerdu; or none. Our findings show that participants better acquired the negation morpheme when the form was congruent with negation in English but not when the two artificial languages alone shared a congruent form. We likewise found unanticipated spillover effects in which participants better acquired the vocabulary and grammar of the artificial languages when all three languages had congruent negation forms. These findings provide insight into the effects of congruence on language acquisition in multilingual environments and Creole language formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel experimental technique using artificial language learning to investigate the relationship between structural priming during communicative interaction, and linguistic regularity. We use unpredictable variation as a test-case, because it is a well-established paradigm to study learners’ biases during acquisition, transmission and interaction. We trained participants on artificial languages exhibiting unpredictable variation in word order, and subsequently had them communicate using these artificial languages. We found evidence for structural priming in two different grammatical constructions and across human-human and human-computer interaction. Priming occurred regardless of behavioral convergence: communication led to shared word order use only in human-human interaction, but priming was observed in all conditions. Furthermore, interaction resulted in the reduction of unpredictable variation in all conditions, suggesting a role for communicative interaction in eliminating unpredictable variation. Regularisation was strongest in human-human interaction and in a condition where participants believed they were interacting with a human but were in fact interacting with a computer. We suggest that participants recognize the counter-functional nature of unpredictable variation and thus act to eliminate this variability during communication. Furthermore, reciprocal priming occurring in human-human interaction drove some pairs of participants to converge on maximally regular, highly predictable linguistic systems. Our method offers potential benefits to both the artificial language learning and the structural priming fields, and provides a useful tool to investigate communicative processes that lead to language change and ultimately language design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many languages restrict their lexicons by OCP- Place , a phonotactic constraint against co-occurrences of consonants with shared [place] (e.g., McCarthy, 1986 ). While many previous studies have suggested that listeners have knowledge of OCP- Place and use this for speech processing, it is less clear whether they make reference to an abstract representation of this constraint. In Dutch, OCP- Place gradiently restricts non-adjacent consonant co-occurrences in the lexicon. Focusing on labial-vowel-labial co-occurrences, we found that there are, however, exceptions from the general effect of OCP- Labial : (A) co-occurrences of identical labials are systematically less restricted than co-occurrences of homorganic labials, and (B) some specific pairs (e.g., /pVp/, /bVv/) occur more often than expected. Setting out to study whether exceptions such as (A) and (B) had an effect on processing, the current study presents an artificial language learning experiment and a reanalysis of Boll-Avetisyan and Kager's (2014) speech segmentation data. Results indicate that Dutch listeners can use both knowledge of phonotactic detail and an abstract constraint OCP- Labial as a cue for speech segmentation. We suggest that whether detailed or abstract representations are drawn on depends on the complexity of processing demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing emphasis on statistics in language learning raises the question of whether and when speakers use language in ways that go beyond the statistical regularities in the input. In this study, two groups were exposed to six novel verbs and two novel word order constructions that differed in function: one construction but not the other was exclusively used with pronoun undergoers. The distributional structure of the input was manipulated between groups according to whether each verb was used exclusively in one or the other construction (the lexicalist condition), or whether a minority of verbs was witnessed in both constructions (the alternating condition). Production and judgments results demonstrate that participants tended to generalize the constructions for use in appropriate discourse contexts, ignoring evidence of verb-specific behavior, especially in the alternating condition. Our results suggest that construction learning involves an interaction of witnessed usage together with the functions of the constructions involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental question for cognitive science concerns the ways in which languages are shaped by the biases of language learners. Recent research using laboratory language learning paradigms, primarily with adults, has shown that structures or rules that are common in the languages of the world are learned or processed more easily than patterns that are rare or unattested. Here we target child learners , investigating a set of biases for word order learning in the noun phrase studied by Culbertson, Smolensky, and Legendre (2012) in college-age adults. We provide the first evidence that child learners exhibit a preference for typologically common harmonic word order patterns—those which preserve the order of the head with respect to its complements—validating the psychological reality of a principle formalized in many different linguistic theories. We also discuss important differences between child and adult learners in terms of both the strength and content of the biases at play during language learning. In particular, the bias favoring harmonic patterns is markedly stronger in children than adults, and children (unlike adults) acquire adjective ordering more readily than numeral ordering. The results point to the importance of investigating learning biases across development in order to understand how these biases may shape the history and structure of natural languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of redundancy in the world languages has long puzzled language researchers. It is especially surprising in light of the growing evidence on speakers' tendency to avoid redundant elements in production (omitting or reducing more predictable elements). Here, we propose that redundancy can be functional for learning. In particular, we argue that redundant cues can facilitate learning, even when they make the language system more complicated. This prediction is further motivated by the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis (Lupyan & Dale, 2010), which suggests that morphological complexity can arise due to the advantage redundancy might confer for child learners. We test these hypotheses in an artificial language learning study with children and adults, where either word order alone or both word order and case marking serve as cues for thematic assignment in a novel construction. We predict, and find, that children learning the redundant language learn to produce it, and show better comprehension of the novel thematic assignment than children learning the non-redundant language, despite having to learn an additional morpheme. Children in both conditions were similarly accurate in producing the novel word order, suggesting redundancy might have a differential effect on comprehension and production. Adults did not show better learning in the redundant condition, most likely because they were at ceiling in both conditions. We discuss implications for theories of language learning and language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M =5:2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN1N2, paired with a novel abstract meaning: N2 approaches N1. At the same time, we find that children are keenly sensitive to the input: they show knowledge of the construction after a single day of exposure but this grows stronger after 3days; also, children generalize more readily to new verbs when the input contains more than one verb. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: How recurrent typological patterns, or universals, emerge from the extensive diversity found across the world’s languages constitutes a central question for linguistics and cognitive science. Recent challenges to a fundamental assumption of generative linguistics—that universal properties of the human language acquisition faculty constrain the types of grammatical systems which can occur—suggest the need for new types of empirical evidence connecting typology to biases of learners. Using an artificial language learning paradigm in which adult subjects are exposed to a mix of grammatical systems (similar to a period of linguistic change), we show that learners’ biases mirror a word-order universal, first proposed by Joseph Greenberg, which constrains typological patterns of adjective, numeral, and noun ordering. We briefly summarize the results of a probabilistic model of the hypothesized biases and their effect on learning, and discuss the broader implications of the results for current theories of the origins of cross-linguistic word-order preferences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Children learning the inflections of their native language show the ability to generalize beyond the perceptual particulars of the examples they are exposed to. The phenomenon of “rule learning”—quick learning of abstract regularities from exposure to a limited set of stimuli—has become an important model system for understanding generalization in infancy. Experiments with adults and children have revealed differences in performance across domains and types of rules. To understand the representational and inferential assumptions necessary to capture this broad set of results, we introduce three ideal observer models for rule learning. Each model builds on the next, allowing us to test the consequences of individual assumptions. Model 1 learns a single rule, Model 2 learns a single rule from noisy input, and Model 3 learns multiple rules from noisy input. These models capture a wide range of experimental results—including several that have been used to argue for domain-specificity or limits on the kinds of generalizations learners can make—suggesting that these ideal observers may be a useful baseline for future work on rule learning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Successful language acquisition involves generalization, but learners must balance this against the acquisition of lexical constraints. Such learning has been considered problematic for theories of acquisition: if learners generalize abstract patterns to new words, how do they learn lexically-based exceptions? One approach claims that learners use distributional statistics to make inferences about when generalization is appropriate, a hypothesis which has recently received support from Artificial Language Learning experiments with adult learners (). Since adult and child language learning may be different (), it is essential to extend these results to child learners. In the current work, four groups of children (6years) were each exposed to one of four semi-artificial languages. The results demonstrate that children are sensitive to linguistic distributions at and above the level of particular lexical items, and that these statistics influence the balance between generalization and lexical conservatism. The data are in line with an approach which models generalization as rational inference and in particular with the predictions of the domain general hierarchical Bayesian model developed in Kemp, Perfors & Tenenbaum, 2006. This suggests that such models have relevance for theories of language acquisition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A study combining artificial grammar and sentence comprehension methods investigated the learning and online use of probabilistic, nonadjacent combinatorial constraints. Participants learned a small artificial language describing cartoon monsters acting on objects. Self-paced reading of sentences in the artificial language revealed comprehenders’ sensitivity to nonadjacent combinatorial constraints, without explicit awareness of the probabilities embedded in the language. These results show that even newly-learned constraints have an identifiable effect on online sentence processing. The rapidity of learning in this paradigm relative to others has implications for theories of implicit learning and its role in language acquisition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study combined artificial language learning (ALL) with conventional experimental techniques to test whether statistical speech segmentation outputs are integrated into adult listeners’ mental lexicon. Lexicalization was assessed through inhibitory effects of novel neighbors (created by the parsing process) on auditory lexical decisions to real words. Both immediately after familiarization and post-one week, ALL outputs were lexicalized only when the cues available during familiarization (transitional probabilities and wordlikeness) suggested the same parsing (Experiments 1 and 3). No lexicalization effect occurred with incongruent cues (Experiments 2 and 4). Yet, ALL differed from chance, suggesting a dissociation between item knowledge and lexicalization. Similarly contrasted results were found when frequency of occurrence of the stimuli was equated during familiarization (Experiments 3 and 4). Our findings thus indicate that ALL outputs may be lexicalized as far as the segmentation cues are congruent, and that this process cannot be accounted for by raw frequency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Variation set structure – partial overlap of successive utterances in child-directed speech – has been shown to correlate with progress in children’s acquisition of syntax. We demonstrate the benefits of variation set structure directly: in miniature artificial languages, arranging a certain proportion of utterances in a training corpus in variation sets facilitated word and phrase constituent learning in adults. Our findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of L1 acquisition by children, and for the development of more efficient algorithms for automatic language acquisition, as well as better methods for L2 instruction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Peña, Bonatti, Nespor, and Mehler (2002) investigated an artificial language where the structure of words was determined by nonadjacent dependencies between syllables. They found that segmentation of continuous speech could proceed on the basis of these dependencies. However, Peña et al.'s artificial language contained a confound in terms of phonology, in that the dependent syllables began with plosives and the intervening syllables began with continuants. We consider three hypotheses concerning the role of phonology in speech segmentation in this task: (1) participants may recruit probabilistic phono tactic information from their native language to the artificial language learning task; (2) phonetic properties of the stimuli, such as the gaps that precede unvoiced plosives, can influences segmentation; and (3) grouping by phonological similarity between dependent syllables contributes to learning the dependency. In a series of experiments controlling the phonological and statistical structure of the language, we found that segmentation performance is influenced by the three factors in different degrees. Learning of nonadjacent dependencies did not occur when (3) is eliminated. We suggest that phonological processing provides a fundamental contribution to distributional analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• How do shared syntactic representations develop in late L2 learners? • Structural priming as tool to investigate shared syntactic representations. • Priming assessed during 5 sessions in which an artificial language is learned. • Cross-linguistic priming from Day 1 for transitives and Day 2 for ditransitives. • • Syntactic representations first shared within and later between languages. Two longitudinal studies investigated the development of syntactic representations in late second language (L2) learners by means of structural priming in an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Several studies found cross-linguistic structural priming in L2 learners, suggesting that they have shared syntactic representations across languages. But how are these shared representations established? Hartsuiker and Bernolet's (2017) account claims that 1) L2 syntactic representations evolve gradually from being item-specific to more abstract, and that 2) over time these representations are integrated with available native language (L1) representations. We tested predictions of this theory with native Dutch speakers, who acquired the AL in the lab during five sessions by means of a battery of tasks, the last of which was a sentence priming task. The AL syntax resembled Dutch syntax. We manipulated the relation between prime and target to investigate whether structural priming occurred in conditions with meaning overlap (item-specific) and without overlap (abstract). In Experiment 1, participants responded only in the AL, but in Experiment 2, where the AL was more difficult, the target sentence could also be in Dutch. In both studies, there was an effect of within-language priming and AL-Dutch priming in transitives and ditransitives, but no effect of Dutch-AL priming in ditransitives on Day 1. On Days 2–5, however, priming emerged in most cross-linguistic priming conditions. These findings partly confirm Hartsuiker and Bernolet's (2017) predictions and suggest that at least for structures that are very similar between languages, shared syntactic representations can be established very early during language learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Transition between developmental stages of non-adjacent dependency (NAD) learning. • Children between 1 and 3 years of age showed learning of NADs in a foreign language. • Brain responses revealed associative NAD learning, triggered by passive listening. • Gradual decrease of the strength of associative non-adjacent dependency learning. In order to become proficient native speakers, children have to learn the morpho-syntactic relations between distant elements in a sentence, so-called non-adjacent dependencies (NADs). Previous research suggests that NAD learning in children comprises different developmental stages, where until 2 years of age children are able to learn NADs associatively under passive listening conditions, while starting around the age of 3–4 years children fail to learn NADs during passive listening. To test whether the transition between these developmental stages occurs gradually, we tested children's NAD learning in a foreign language using event-related potentials (ERPs). We found ERP evidence of NAD learning across the ages of 1, 2 and 3 years. The amplitude of the ERP effect indexing NAD learning, however, decreased with age. These findings might indicate a gradual transition in children's ability to learn NADs associatively. Cognitively, this transition might be driven by children's increasing knowledge of their native language, hindering NAD learning in novel contexts. Neuroanatomically, maturation of the prefrontal cortex might play a crucial role, promoting top-down learning, affecting bottom-up, associative learning. In sum, our study suggests that NAD learning under passive listening conditions undergoes a gradual transition between different developmental stages during early childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language learning involves exposure to inconsistent systems - that is, systems where multiple patterns or methods exist to mark some meaning. Inconsistent systems often change to be more regular over time - they become systematized. However, some recent studies have reported that learners tend to reproduce inconsistency in the input, leading to models in which the language learning mechanism is basically preservatory. We ran an artificial language learning experiment using a novel paradigm to extend our understanding of systematizing versus preservatory mechanisms in language learning. Participants were taught two number marking systems, either completely consistently (the probability P of the system is 1.00) or inconsistently (with P = 0.875 for one system and P = 0.125 for the other, and so on for P = 0.75 and P = 0.625). One marking system was a plural-marking system. The other was a typologically rare singulative-marking system. When generalizing to novel items, participants produced more regular output patterns overall for more consistent input conditions than for less consistent ones, and more for the plural-marking conditions than for the singulative-marking conditions. For the singulative-marking conditions, the inter-participant variation was much greater than for the plural-marking ones; some individuals systematized towards the more familiar pattern, some systematized towards the less familiar pattern and some were not significantly different from probability-matching. We analyze the variation in relation to current statistical learning models, showing that preservatory learning models, as well as all models with a single free parameter, fail to capture our results. We show how a model with two free parameters in which individuals can vary in their propensity to systematize in any given situation is more successful. We also discuss implications for the theory of language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Number morphemes are typically placed closer to noun stems than case across languages. • We show that this order is strongly preferred by learners of an artificial language. • The preference holds for learners with different native languages (English and Japanese). • It can be influenced by a bias for adjacent dependencies, but not by morpheme frequency. • Results support the hypothesis that cognitive biases influence morpheme order. A foundational goal of linguistics is to investigate whether shared features of the human cognitive system can explain how linguistic patterns are distributed across languages. In this paper we report a series of artificial language learning experiments which aim to test a hypothesised link between cognition and a persistent regularity of morpheme order: number morphemes (e.g., plural markers) tend to be ordered closer to noun stems than case morphemes (e.g., accusative markers) (Universal 39; Greenberg, 1963). We argue that this typological tendency may be driven by learners' bias towards orders that reflect scopal relationships in morphosyntactic and semantic composition (Bybee, 1985; Rice, 2000; Culbertson & Adger, 2014). This bias is borne out by our experimental results: learners—in the absence of any evidence on how to order number and case morphology—consistently produce number closer to the noun stem. We replicate this effect across two populations (English and Japanese speakers). We also find that it holds independent of morpheme position (prefixal or suffixal), degree of boundedness (free or bound morphology), frequency, and which particular case/number feature values are instantiated in the overt markers (accusative or nominative, plural or singulative). However, we show that this tendency can be reversed when the form of the case marker is made highly dependent on the noun stem, suggesting an influence of an additional bias for local dependencies. Our results provide evidence that universal features of cognition may play a causal role in shaping the relative order of morphemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments reported that harmonic noun phrase word orders were preferred over non-harmonic orders by English-speaking adults and children (Culbertson et al., 2012; Culbertson & Newport, 2015, 2017). However, this evidence is potentially confounded by the fact that English is itself a harmonic language (Goldberg, 2013). Here we sought to extend the results from these studies by exploring whether learners who have substantial experience with a non-harmonic language still showed a bias for harmonic patterns during learning. We found that monolingual French- and Hebrew-speaking children, whose language has a non-harmonic noun phrase order (N Adj, Num N) nevertheless preferred harmonic patterns when learning an artificial language. We also found evidence for a harmony bias across several populations of adult learners, although this interacted in complex ways with their L2 experience. Our results suggest that transfer from the L1 cannot explain the preference for harmony found in previous studies. Moreover, they provide the strongest evidence yet that a cognitive bias for harmony is a plausible candidate for shaping linguistic typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-adjacent dependencies are ubiquitous in language, but difficult to learn in artificial language experiments in the lab. Previous research suggests that non-adjacent dependencies are more learnable given structural support in the input - for instance, in the presence of high variability between dependent items. However, not all non-adjacent dependencies occur in supportive contexts. How are such regularities learned? One possibility is that learning one set of non-adjacent dependencies can highlight similar structures in subsequent input, facilitating the acquisition of new non-adjacent dependencies that are otherwise difficult to learn. In three experiments, we show that prior exposure to learnable non-adjacent dependencies - i.e., dependencies presented in a learning context that has been shown to facilitate discovery - improves learning of novel non-adjacent regularities that are typically not detected. These findings demonstrate how the discovery of complex linguistic structures can build on past learning in supportive contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn (Typological Prevalence Hypothesis; TPH). Prior work supports this idea in phonology, morphology and syntax but has not addressed semantics. Using Artificial Language Learning experiments with adults, we test predictions made by the TPH about the relative learnability of semantic distinctions in the domain of evidentiality, i.e., the linguistic encoding of information source. As the TPH predicted, when exposed to miniature evidential morphological systems, adult speakers of English whose language does not encode evidentiality grammatically learned the typologically most prevalent system (marking indirect, reportative information) better compared to less-attested systems (Experiments 1-2). Similar patterns were observed when non-linguistic symbols were used to encode evidential distinctions (Experiment 3). Our data support the conjecture that some semantic distinctions are marked preferentially and acquired more easily compared to others in both language and other symbolic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]