In simple experiments where people used silent gestures to describe things, researchers found a clear pull: people tend to present objects before describing their properties, yet they tend to present possessive relations before the possessor. Those choices appeared when no language conventions constrained participants. When an existing order was introduced, however, learners adopted the system and the category-specific preferences faded. This pattern shows that some biases surface during the birth of communicative conventions, while others shape what learners keep once a system exists.
Why this matters for human potential and inclusion is the ways our minds and social learning interact to form shared systems. Patterns that arise from innate or intuitive ordering can influence who fits easily into a community of speakers and how accessible information is for learners from different backgrounds. Follow the link to see the experiments and think about how small cognitive tendencies can ripple into stable grammatical facts that shape communication across cultures.
Abstract
Certain recurrent features of language characterize the way a whole language system is structured. By contrast, others target specific categories of items within those wider systems. For example, languages tend to exhibit consistent order of heads and dependents across different phrases—a system-wide regularity known as harmony. While this tendency is generally robust, some specific syntactic categories appear to deviate from the trend. We examine one such case, the order of adjectives and genitives, which do not exhibit a typological tendency for consistent order with respect to the noun. Instead, adjectives tend to follow and genitives precede the noun. Across two silent gesture experiments, we test the hypothesis that these category-specific ordering tendencies reflect cognitive biases that favor (i) conveying objects before properties that modify them, but (ii) conveying expressions of possession before possessors. While our hypothesis is thus that these biases are semantic in nature—they impact preferences for how concepts are ordered—the claim is that they may have downstream effects on conventionalized syntax by contributing to an over-representation of postnominal adjectives and prenominal genitives. We find that these biases affect gesture order in contexts where no conventionalized system is in place. When a system is in place, participants learn that system, and category-specific biases do not impact their learning. Our results suggest that different contexts reveal distinct types of cognitive biases; some are active during learning and others are active during language creation.
