Study title

There is a longstanding debate in cognitive science surrounding the source of commonalities among languages of the world. Indeed, there are many potential explanations for such commonalities—accidents of history, common processes of language change, memory limitations, constraints on linguistic representations, etc. Recent research has used psycholinguistic experiments to provide empirical evidence linking common linguistic patterns to specific features of human cognition, but these experiments tend to use English speakers, who in many cases have direct experience with precisely the common patterns of interest. Here, we highlight the importance of testing populations whose languages go against cross-linguistic trends. We investigate whether monolingual speakers of Kîîtharaka, which has an unusual way of ordering words, mirror those of English speakers. We find that they do, supporting the hypothesis that universal cognitive representations play a role in shaping word order.Languages can be very different from each other. For example, just focussing on the order of words, languages like English put adjectives before nouns ('red house') while languages like Thai put them afterwards ('house red'). Similarly, languages like Vietnamese put Numerals before nouns ('three houses'), while others, like the Kitharaka (spoken in Kenya), put numerals after ('houses three'). If word ordering was simply due to happenstance, we would expect to see all different orders appearing in equal proportion across languages, but we don't find that. In fact, some orders are very common, some are very rare, and some don't seem to appear at all. For example, many languages are ordered like English ('three red houses'), and many are also ordered like Thai, which is exactly the reverse ('houses red three'). But the Kitharaka order ('houses three red') is much rarer, and its mirror image ('red three houses') never seems to occur. Why is this? One of the major controversies in the language...