Category-specific and system-wide preferences in competition: Evidence from noun phrase harmony

Abstract

Typological data show a tendency for languages to exhibit harmonic (i.e. consistent) ordering between heads and dependents. Previous experimental work using artificial language learning experiments has shown that learners prefer harmonic patterns. This suggests that the typological trend for harmony may, at least in part, be driven by a cognitive bias. However, it is well-documented that specific categories sometimes contradict this tendency. Here we investigate one such case in the domain of the noun phrase. While many nominal dependents exhibit harmony, adjectives and genitives do not: adjectives tend to follow the noun and genitives tend to precede. Previous experiments have identified the existence of cognitive biases that keep these dependents split across the head noun in contexts where there is no conventional language system in place. In this study we use a silent gesture experiment to examine whether the specific biases that apply to these two dependent types compete with a general preference for harmony in an artificial language learning task. Specifically, we examine whether participants' learning behaviour is consistent with a preference not just for harmony, but for a non-harmonic order where adjectives follow and genitives precede the noun. What we find instead is that participants preference for harmony is not modulated by category-specific biases for prenominal genitives and postnominal adjectives. Thus when participants are learning a conventionalised system, the general bias in favour of harmony overrides category-specific preferences. We discuss the implications of this finding for explanations of typological tendencies which link them to cognitive biases.

Does degree of innovation modulate the influence of cognitive biases on language structure?

“…This suggests that, while the system-wide preference for harmony is observed in learning, it is not necessarily observed in pure improvisation. Similarly, while category-specific preference for nominal dependent ordering are evident in improvisation tasks, consistent evidence that these same orders are learned better than others is missing (Holtz, 2019;Holtz et al, 2023a). In this paper, we argue that this pattern of results, where some biases seem to be active during language learning, and some biases seem to be active during language creation, is potentially both more significant and more general than has previously been noted.…”

“…We also expected to find evidence of other variabilityreducing strategies, such as conditioning order on specific lexical items. Importantly, based on the results from Holtz et al (2023a) and the conceptualisation of the Scale of Innovation, we do not expect to find any evidence of a preference for natural orders. This means we do not expect better overall learning or more regularisation in the natural condition, or better learning of individual dependent orders that conform to a category-specific bias.…”

“…Based on Holtz et al (2023a), we had three main predictions for this experiment. Firstly, we predicted an overall preference for harmony, such that participants across conditions would prefer consistent orders between heads and dependents.…”

“…In Experiment 1 we first aim to replicate Holtz et al (2023a), who find evidence for a system-wide bias for harmony, but no influence of categoryspecific biases (either postnominal adjectives or prenominal genitives) in a (Dryer, 2013b,a) and signed (sig.) language typological data (Coons, 2022).…”

“…Do et al (2022) use a regularisation design but also include novel items in the test set. They find some evidence of a category-specific preference for postnominal adjectives, unlike Holtz et al (2023a), who do not use novel items at test.…”