Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase

Noun phrase word order varies cross-linguistically, however, two distributional asymmetries have attracted substantial attention (i.a., Greenberg 1963, Cinque 2005). First, the most common orders place adjectives closest to the noun, then numerals, then demonstratives (e.g., N-Adj- Num-Dem). Second, exceptions to this are restricted to post-nominal position (e.g., N-Dem- Num-Adj, but not Adj-Num-Dem-N). These observations have been argued to reflect constraints on cognition. Here we report two experiments, following work by Culbertson & Adger (2014), providing additional support for this claim. We taught English- and Thai-speaking participants artificial languages in which the position of modifiers relative to the noun differed from their native order (post-nominal position in English, pre-nominal in Thai). We trained participants on single-modifier phrases, and asked them to extrapolate to multiple modifier phrases. We found that both populations infer relative orders of modifiers that conform to the tendency for closest proximity of adjectives, then numerals, then demonstratives. Further, we show that Thai participants, learning pre-nominal modifiers, exhibit a stronger such preference. These results track the typology closely and are consistent with the claim that noun phrase word order reflects properties of human cognition. We discuss future research needed to rule out alternative explanations for our findings, including prior language experience

A Non-local Attachment Preference in the Production and Comprehension of Thai Relative Clauses

In parsing, a phrase is more likely to be associated with an adjacent word than to a non-adjacent one. Instances of adjacency violation pose a challenge to researchers but also an opportunity to better understand how people process sentences and to improve parsing algorithms by, for example, suggesting new features that can be used in machine learning. We report corpus counts and reading-time data for Thai to investigate an adjacency violation that has been reported in other languages for ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns, namely, the local noun (which is adjacent to the relative clause) or the non-local noun (which is farther from the relative clause). The results indicate that, unlike English, Thai violates adjacency by favoring non-local attachment even though the two languages share many grammatical features that have been linked to a local-attachment preference (e.g., rigid SVO word order). We re-interpret previous proposals to suggest that a language favors the non-local noun if it passes at least one of two tests. (1) Modifiers can intervene between noun and relative clause. (2) Adverbs can intervene between transitive verb and direct object.