{"pk":26814,"title":"Harmony in a non-harmonic language: word order learning in French children","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Recent studies using artificial language learning have arguedthat the cross-linguistic frequency of harmonic word orderpatterns–in which heads are ordered consistently before or af-ter dependents across syntactic categories–reflects a cognitivebias (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012; Culbertson& Newport, 2015a). These studies suggest that English speak-ing adults and children favor harmonic orders of nouns anddifferent nominal modifiers (adjectives, numerals). However,because they target English learners, whose native languageis harmonic in the nominal domain (Num-Adj-N), this pref-erence may be based on transfer rather than a universal biasfor harmony. We present new evidence from French-speakingchildren, whose native language is non-harmonic in this do-main (Num-N-Adj). Our results reveal clear effects of nativelanguage transfer, but also evidence that a harmonic pattern isfavored even in this population of learners.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"cognitive biases; artificial language learning; ty-pology; syntax; word order; French"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/14p705nx","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Guillaume","middle_name":" ","last_name":"Braquet","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Jennifer","middle_name":"","last_name":"Culbertson","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26814/galley/16450/download/"}]}