Connecting cognitive biases and typological universals in syntax

语言之间可能非常不同。例如，只关注单词的顺序，像英语这样的语言把形容词放在名词前面（“red house”），而像泰语这样的语言把形容词放在名词后面（“house red”）。类似地，像越南语这样的语言把数字放在名词前面（“三所房子”），而其他语言，比如肯尼亚的基塔拉卡语，把数字放在名词后面（“三所房子”）。如果词的顺序仅仅是偶然的，我们会期望看到所有不同的顺序在不同语言中出现的比例相等，但我们没有发现。事实上，有些订单非常常见，有些订单非常罕见，有些订单似乎根本不会出现。例如，许多语言的顺序像英语（‘three red houses‘），也有许多语言的顺序像泰语，而泰语的顺序恰恰相反（’houses red three’）。但基塔拉卡秩序（“三间红房子”）要罕见得多，它的镜像（“三间红房子”）似乎从未出现过。为什么会这样？语言科学的主要争议之一是，我们是否需要诉诸人类思维的基本结构来解释语言的变化方式，或者这些特性是否是交流和社会互动中文化差异的结果。最近大量来自心理学视角的研究假设了后者：语言的特性可以归结为交流、互动和历史的变幻莫测，而语言学的大部分研究假设了前者：人类思维中一定存在偏见，使我们比其他类型的语言更容易学习特定类型的语言。本项目旨在解决这一问题。为了做到这一点，我们测试了人们学习不同类型语言的能力，看看他们的行为是否遵循我们在真实语言中看到的一般趋势。重要的是，我们使用人工构建的语言，而不是自然语言，以确保它们只在关键方面有所不同。例如，我们向说英语的人展示使用泰语和基塔拉卡语词序的人工语言。如果泰语顺序在不同语言中比基塔拉卡语顺序更常见是因为前者更容易学习，那么我们应该在我们的实验中看到学习者的行为反映了这一点。我们还可以看到，这些模式是否总是更难学，还是说一种使用它们的语言（如基塔拉语）更容易在一门新语言中掌握它们。为了做到这一点，我们的实验比较了说英语、泰语、越南语和基塔拉卡语的人。如果我们的学习者在学习人工语言的过程中都表现出与我们在学习真实语言时发现的相同的模式，那就表明语言的变化方式不是随机的，也不完全是历史事实的产物。相反，它表明存在普遍的认知偏见在起作用。我们不仅要研究顺序出现的基本问题，还要研究另外两个众所周知的情况，即语言似乎不是随机变化的。第一个是形容词和数字之类的词相对于它们所修饰的名词的放置方式：大多数语言都将它们放在前面或后面（如英语和泰语），而不是把它们放在对面（例如，“two house red”，如越南语）。我们将测试这种模式在一门新语言中是否总是更容易学习。其次，我们将研究人们是否更喜欢学习带有后缀的语言（例如，“cat-s”）而不是前缀（例如，“un-happy”）。这两种类型在英语中都有，但大多数语言有（更多）后缀。我们的项目将阐明在语言学习中是否存在普遍的认知偏见，这种偏见是否在我们所研究的特定现象中起作用，以及人们的母语如何影响这些偏见。

Languages can be very different from each other. For example, just focussing on the order of words, languages like English put adjectives before nouns ('red house') while languages like Thai put them afterwards ('house red'). Similarly, languages like Vietnamese put Numerals before nouns ('three houses'), while others, like the Kitharaka (spoken in Kenya), put numerals after ('houses three'). If word ordering was simply due to happenstance, we would expect to see all different orders appearing in equal proportion across languages, but we don't find that. In fact, some orders are very common, some are very rare, and some don't seem to appear at all. For example, many languages are ordered like English ('three red houses'), and many are also ordered like Thai, which is exactly the reverse ('houses red three'). But the Kitharaka order ('houses three red') is much rarer, and its mirror image ('red three houses') never seems to occur. Why is this?One of the major controversies in the language sciences is whether we need to appeal to the basic set-up of the human mind to explain the ways languages can vary, or whether these properties are instead a result of cultural differences in communication and social interaction. A great deal of recent work coming from the perspective of psychology assumes the latter: that the properties of language can be boiled down to communication, interaction and the vagaries of history, while most work in linguistics assumes the former: there must be biases in the human mind that allow us to learn languages of particular types more easily than others. This project seeks to resolve that issue.In order to do this, we test how well people learn languages of various types, to see whether their behaviour follows the general tendencies we see across real languages. Importantly, we use artificially constructed languages, rather than natural languages, in order to make sure that they only differ in the crucial respects. For example, we present English speakers with artificial languages that use word orders from Thai and Kitharaka. If Thai orders are more common across languages than Kitharaka ones because the former are easier to learn, then we should see this reflected in the behaviour of learners in our experiments. We can also see whether such patterns are always harder to learn, or if speaking a language which uses them-like Kitharaka-makes them easier to pick up in a new language. To do this, our experiments compare English, Thai, Vietnamese and Kitharaka speakers. If our learners all show the same kinds of patterns in how they learn our artificial languages that we find across real languages, that will suggest that the way languages vary is not random, nor is it entirely a product of historical facts. Rather it would suggest that there are universal cognitive biases at play. We plan to look at not just the basic question of what orders appear, but also two other well-known cases where languages don't seem to vary randomly. The first relates to how words like adjectives and numbers are placed relative to the nouns they modify: most languages place them both before or after (like English and Thai), rather than putting them on opposite sides (e.g., 'two houses red', like Vietnamese). We will test whether this type of pattern is always easier to learn in a new language. Second, we will look at whether people prefer to learn languages with suffixes (e.g., 'cat-s') rather than prefixes (e.g., 'un-happy'). Both types are present in English, but most languages have (more) suffixes. Our project we will shed light on whether there are universal cognitive biases in language learning, if such biases are at play for the particular phenomena we look at, and how people's native languages affect these biases.