{"pk":21176,"title":"Category-specific and system-wide preferences in competition: Evidence from noun phrase harmony","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p>Typological data show a tendency for languages to exhibit harmonic (i.e., consistent) ordering between heads and dependents. Previous experimental work using artificial language learning experiments has shown that learners prefer harmonic patterns. This suggests that the typological trend for harmony may, at least in part, be driven by a cognitive bias. However, it is well-documented that specific categories sometimes contradict this tendency. Here, we investigate one such case in the domain of the noun phrase. While many nominal dependents exhibit harmony, adjectives and genitives do not: adjectives tend to follow the noun and genitives tend to precede. Previous experiments have identified the existence of cognitive biases that keep these dependents split across the head noun in contexts where there is no conventional language system in place. In this study, we use a silent gesture experiment to examine whether the specific biases that apply to these two dependent types compete with a general preference for harmony in an artificial language learning task. Specifically, we examine whether participants’ learning behaviour is consistent with a preference not just for harmony, but for a non-harmonic order where adjectives follow and genitives precede the noun. What we find, instead, is that participants’ preference for consistent language systems is not modulated by category-specific biases for prenominal genitives and postnominal adjectives. We discuss the implications of this finding for explanations of typological tendencies which link them to cognitive biases.</p>","language":"eng","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[],"section":"Regular Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0wf4b90q","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Annie","middle_name":"","last_name":"Holtz","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":"Centre for Language Evolution"},{"first_name":"Jennifer","middle_name":"","last_name":"Culbertson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":"Centre for Language Evolution"},{"first_name":"Simon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kirby","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":"Centre for Language Evolution"}],"date_submitted":"2024-05-14T08:27:06.696000Z","date_accepted":"2026-02-23T21:29:44.834211Z","date_published":"2026-04-16T18:00:00Z","render_galley":{"label":"XML","type":"xml","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/21176/galley/49374/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/21176/galley/49373/download/"},{"label":"XML","type":"xml","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/21176/galley/49374/download/"}]}