Cross-linguistic patterns of morpheme order reflect cognitive biases: An experimental study of case and number morphology

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F21%3A10439923" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/21:10439923 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=9ECx7z67VQ" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=9ECx7z67VQ</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104204" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.jml.2020.104204</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Cross-linguistic patterns of morpheme order reflect cognitive biases: An experimental study of case and number morphology

Original language description

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&apos; bias towards orders that reflect scopal relationships in morphosyntactic and semantic composition (Bybee, 1985; Rice, 2000; Culbertson &amp; 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.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

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Publication year

2021

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Journal of Memory and Language [online]

ISSN

1096-0821

e-ISSN

—

Volume of the periodical

2021

Issue of the periodical within the volume

118

Country of publishing house

GB - UNITED KINGDOM

Number of pages

13

Pages from-to

104204

UT code for WoS article

000633225700004

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85100387884