{"pk":27356,"title":"Silent gesture and noun phrase universals","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In this paper we investigate a hypothesized cognitive bias forisomorphic mappings between conceptual structure and linearorder in the noun phrase. This bias has been proposed as a pos-sible explanation for a striking asymmetry in the typology ofthe noun phrase–linear orders which place the adjective clos-est to the noun, then the numeral, then the demonstrative, areover-represented in the world’s languages. Previous experi-mental work has provided evidence that an isomorphism biasaffects English-speaking learners’ inferences about the relativeorder of modifiers in an artificial language. Here, we use thesilent gesture paradigm to explore whether the isomorphismbias influences spontaneous gestures innovated by participantsin a modality with which they have relatively little prior experi-ence. We find that gesture string order largely conforms to thesame striking pattern found in noun phrase typology, support-ing the role of the isomorphism bias in shaping the emergenceof language (and language-like) systems.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"silent gesture; noun phrase; word order; linguisticuniversals; cognitive biases"}],"section":"Posters: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/34k8h93m","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Marieke","middle_name":"","last_name":"Schouwstra","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Simon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kirby","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Jennifer","middle_name":"","last_name":"Culbertson","name_suffix":"","institution":"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/27356/galley/16992/download/"}]}