Innovation of Word Order Harmony Across Development

The tendency for languages to use harmonic word order patterns—orders that place heads in a consistent position with respect to modifiers or other dependents—has been noted since the 1960s. As with many other statistical typological tendencies, there has been debate regarding whether harmony reflects properties of human cognition or forces external to it. Recent research using laboratory language learning has shown that children and adults find harmonic patterns easier to learn than nonharmonic patterns (Culbertson & Newport, 2015; Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012). This supports a link between learning and typological frequency: if harmonic patterns are easier to learn, while nonharmonic patterns are more likely to be targets of change, then, all things equal, harmonic patterns will be more frequent in the world’s languages. However, these previous studies relied on variation in the input as a mechanism for change in the lab; learners were exposed to variable word order, allowing them to shift the frequencies of different orders so that harmonic patterns became more frequent. Here we teach adult and child learners languages that are consistently nonharmonic, with no variation. While adults perfectly maintain these consistently nonharmonic patterns, young child learners innovate novel orders, changing nonharmonic patterns into harmonic ones. AN APPARENT PREFERENCE FOR HARMONIC WORD ORDER PATTERNS One of the most well-studied typological tendencies found in language concerns the ordering of heads with respect to modifiers and other dependents. Languages tend to use harmonic orders, placing heads either consistently before or consistently after their dependents (Dryer, 1992; Greenberg, 1963). A simple example is the noun phrase, where the head noun can be modified by elements like adjectives and number words. Almost 80% of languages in the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (Dryer, 2013a, 2013b) are classified as placing the noun either before both adjectives and numerals (i.e., N-Adj, N-Num) or after both of them (i.e., Adj-N, Num-N). The nonharmonic combinations of these two phrase types are much less common (i.e., N-Adj, Num-N or Adj-N, N-Num). This preference for harmony is found across many syntactic categories; for example, there is also a strong tendency for languages with head-initial Verb-Object order to have head-initial Preposition-Noun order and vice versa (see Dryer, 1992). While a number of theoretical proposals have been made to incorporate a constraint for harmony into grammatical theory (e.g., Baker, 2001; Chomsky, 1988; Travis, 1984), the statistical nature of this typological tendency has also led to alternative explanations. For example, the harmony bias has been argued to reflect general cognitive or processing constraints (e.g., favoring shorter dependencies, or simpler grammars; a n o p e n a c c e s s j o u r n a l Citation: Culbertson, J., & Newport, E. L. (2017). Innovation of Word Order Harmony Across Development. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 1(2), 91–100. https://doi.org/ 10.1162/opmi_a_00010 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00010 Received: 22 December 2016 Accepted: 17 April 2017 Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Corresponding Author: Jennifer Culbertson [email protected] Copyright: © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license