Innovation of Word Order Harmony Across Development.

Jennifer Culbertson,Elissa L Newport

doi:10.1162/opmi_a_00010

Abstract

The tendency for languages to use harmonic word order patterns—orders that place heads in a consistent position with respect to modifiers or other dependents—has been noted since the 1960s. As with many other statistical typological tendencies, there has been debate regarding whether harmony reflects properties of human cognition or forces external to it. Recent research using laboratory language learning has shown that children and adults find harmonic patterns easier to learn than nonharmonic patterns (Culbertson & Newport, 2015; Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). This supports a link between learning and typological frequency: if harmonic patterns are easier to learn, while nonharmonic patterns are more likely to be targets of change, then, all things equal, harmonic patterns will be more frequent in the world’s languages. However, these previous studies relied on variation in the input as a mechanism for change in the lab; learners were exposed to variable word order, allowing them to shift the frequencies of different orders so that harmonic patterns became more frequent. Here we teach adult and child learners languages that are consistently nonharmonic, with no variation. While adults perfectly maintain these consistently nonharmonic patterns, young child learners innovate novel orders, changing nonharmonic patterns into harmonic ones.

Highlights

One of the most well-studied typological tendencies found in language concerns the ordering of heads with respect to modifiers and other dependents
Recent research suggests that artificial language learning experiments can provide a way to explore this—both for very general features of language, like compositionality (e.g., Kirby, Cornish, & Smith, 2008; Kirby, Tamariz, Cornish, & Smith, 2015), and for very specific types of rules, like vowel harmony (e.g., Finley & Badecker, 2009) or differential case marking (Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2012)
Laboratory studies have shown that learners prefer harmonic over nonharmonic word order patterns

Summary

Introduction

One of the most well-studied typological tendencies found in language concerns the ordering of heads with respect to modifiers and other dependents. In this article we present adult and child learners with artificial languages that are perfectly and consistently nonharmonic in word order—that is, that always have their adjectives in a different position with respect to head nouns than their numerals—and ask whether these learners will innovate new orders that make nonharmonic languages more harmonic The results of this examination will reveal whether the tendency to favor harmony is so strong that new word order patterns may be developed during learning, and, if so, in which learners this process is likely to occur

Methods

Results

Conclusion