Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the (...) universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of “universal,” we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills. (shrink)

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages (...) containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross‐linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross‐linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning. (shrink)

It is well established that language production and comprehension are influenced by information status, for example, whether information is given, new, topical, or predictable, and many scholars suggest that an important component of information status is keeping track of what information is in common ground, and what is not. Information status affects both speakers' choices and how listeners interpret the speaker's meaning. Although there is a wealth of scholarly work on information status, there is no consensus on the mechanisms by (...) which it is used, and in fact relatively little discussion of the underlying representations and psycholinguistic mechanisms. Moreover, a major challenge to understanding information status is that its effects are notoriously variable. This study considers existing proposals about information status, focusing on two questions: how is it represented; and by what mechanisms is it used? I propose that it is important to consider whether representations and mechanisms can be classified as either explicit or emergent. Based on a review of existing evidence, I argue that information status representations are most likely emergent, but the mechanisms by which they are used are both explicit and emergent. This review provides one of the first considerations of information status processing across multiple domains. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change (...) are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics. (shrink)

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing (...) optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross-linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross-linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning. (shrink)

It is a reasonable assumption that universal properties of natural languages are not accidental. They occur either because they are underwritten by genetic code, because they assist in language processing or language learning, or due to some combination of the two. In this paper we investigate one such language universal: the suffixing preference across the world’s languages, whereby inflections tend to be added to the end of words. A corpus analysis of child‐directed speech in English found that suffixes were more (...) accurate at cuing the grammatical category of the root word than were prefixes. An artificial language experiment found that there was a learning advantage for suffixes over prefixes in terms of grammatical categorization within an artificial language. The results are consistent with an account of language universals that originate in general purpose learning mechanisms. (shrink)