Cognitive accessibility predicts word order of couples’ names in English and Japanese

We investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple (N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal histories give rise to a remarkably systematic linguistic generalization in both English and Japanese. Insofar as closeness serves as an index ofcognitive accessibility, the current work demonstrates that systematicity emerges from a domain-general property of memory.