Abstract
Recent research in infant cognition and adult vision suggests that the mechanical object relationships may be more salient and naturally attention grabbing than similar but non-mechanical relationships. Here we examine two novel sources of evidence from language related to this hypothesis. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that adults preferentially infer that the meaning of a novel preposition refers to a mechanical as opposed to a non-mechanical relationship. Experiments 3 and 4 examine cross-linguistic adpositions obtained on a large scale from machines or from experts, respectively. While these methods differ in the ease of data collection relative to the reliability of the data, their results converge: we find that across a range of diverse and historically unrelated languages, adpositions (such as prepositions) referring to the mechanical relationships of containment (e.g “in”) and support (e.g. “on”) are systematically shorter than closely matched but not mechanical words such as “behind,” “beside,” “above,” “over,” “out,” and “off.” These results first suggest that languages regularly contain traces of core knowledge representations and that cross-linguistic regularities can therefore be a useful and easily accessible form of information that bears on the foundations of non-linguistic thought.
Highlights
Psychologists interested in the roots of human conceptual development have postulated the existence of a handful of “core” knowledge systems which could help get learning off the ground in infancy by orienting attention to important ontological categories as well as by representing the principles guiding the behavior of the members of these categories [1]
The current paper concentrates on a specific core system that has been postulated by psychologists: that of “contact mechanics” [5,6] which may form the foundations for learning about physical interactions between objects as well as artifact functions
We hypothesize that increased conceptual salience for mechanical object relationships will in turn lead to increased frequency of usage for terms referring to such relationships, making them shorter. While this connection between core cognition and word length has never been tested directly to our knowledge, the existing literature on prepositions is suggestive that biases generated by non-linguistic core cognition could serve to influence prepositional structure in the manner hypothesized here (we focus in this paper on prepositions and adpositions because (1) these have received a large amount of attention in the linguistics literature and (2) because the majority of the data we received regarded adpositions
Summary
Psychologists interested in the roots of human conceptual development have postulated the existence of a handful of “core” knowledge systems which could help get learning off the ground in infancy by orienting attention to important ontological categories (e.g. animate actors; physical objects) as well as by representing the principles guiding the behavior of the members of these categories [1]. Such core knowledge does not disappear once we exit infancy, but continues to structure mechanisms of language use [2,3] and visual perception [4] throughout the lifespan.
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