Lecture: Evidence in Support of a Cognitive Bias for Cross-Category Harmony between the Verb Phrase and the Adpositional Phrase in the Absence of Surface-Level Patterns
The vast majority of languages for which we have the data display syntactic harmony between the verb phrase and the adpositional phrase. Previous work suggests this is due to the cross-linguistic tendency for adpositions to derive from verbs. Research using experimental methods, on the other hand, indicates there may be a cognitive bias for harmony which also contributes to its cross-linguistic prevalence. These studies, however, all use the same objects for both the priming and testing stimuli. This leaves open the possibility of participants noticing surface-level patterns such as ‘the saucepan is always gestured first’, and using these in their responses, giving the appearance of a preference for syntactically harmonic patterns.
In this talk I describe three experiments designed to establish whether there is a cognitive bias for harmony between the adpositional phrase and the verb phrase, when the possibility of using surface-level patterns is removed. These used a combination of artificial language learning and silent gesture perception methods. Experiment 1 investigated the possibility of a baseline preference for adpositional phrase order in English-speaking participants, because it is the extent of their preference for particular adpositional orders which is manipulated in experiments 2 and 3. Results showed no evidence for a baseline preference for prepositions or postpositions. Experiment 2 showed that the experimental methods employed are sufficient to demonstrate a harmony effect when the elements in the priming and testing stimuli are the same. This replicates results of previous experiments which utilised different methods. Experiment 3 revealed a preference for harmonic patterns is also present when there are no repeated elements in the priming and testing stimuli, to a lesser extent than in experiment 2. This indicates that there is a bias for harmony between the verb phrase and the adpositional phrase which at least partially contributes to the typological patterns. It also highlights the importance of ensuring that stimuli for such studies are designed to remove the possibility of using surface-level patterns.
Info
Day:
2022-05-28
Start time:
14:30
Duration:
00:30
Room:
Eisenga (2.32)
Track:
Neuro- and Psycholinguistics
Language:
en
Links:
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