A learning bias for word order harmony: evidence from speakers of non-harmonic languages

Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world’s languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments reported that harmonic noun phrase word orders were preferred over non-harmonic orders by English-speaking adults and children (Culbertson et al. 2012, Culbertson & Newport 2015, 2017). However, this evidence is potentially confounded by the fact that English is itself a harmonic language (Goldberg 2013). Here we sought to extend the results from these studies by exploring whether learners who have substantial experience with a non-harmonic language still showed a bias for harmonic patterns during learning. We found that monolingual French- and Hebrew-speaking children, whose language has a non-harmonic noun phrase order (N Adj, Num N) nevertheless preferred harmonic patterns when learning an artificial language. We also found evidence for a harmony bias across several populations of adult learners, although this interacted in complex ways with their L2 experience. Our results suggest that transfer from the L1 cannot explain the preference for harmony found in previous studies. Moreover, they provide the strongest evidence yet that a cognitive bias for harmony is a plausible candidate for shaping linguistic typology.