A Universal Cognitive Bias in Word Order: Evidence From Speakers Whose Language Goes Against It

There is a longstanding debate in cognitive science surrounding the source of commonalities among languages of the world. Indeed, there are many potential explanations for such commonalities—accidents of history, common processes of language change, memory limitations, constraints on linguistic representations, etc. Recent research has used psycholinguistic experiments to provide empirical evidence linking common linguistic patterns to specific features of human cognition, but these experiments tend to use English speakers, who in many cases have direct experience with precisely the common patterns of interest. Here, we highlight the importance of testing populations whose languages go against cross-linguistic trends. We investigate whether monolingual speakers of Kîîtharaka, which has an unusual way of ordering words, mirror those of English speakers. We find that they do, supporting the hypothesis that universal cognitive representations play a role in shaping word order.