Typology and the cognitive science of non-WEIRD languages: The role of memory types. A research project

Linguistic typology has identified many of the aspects that are shared by the world’s languages, as well as aspects in which languages diverge, including infrequent or rare phenomena. Cognitive biases are one important source of language universals through their indirect effect on language change via their impact on language learning and language use. Likewise, typologically rare phenomena exist because the human brain is able to accommodate them. Nonetheless, our knowledge of how human cognition processes language (and language diversity) mostly derives from the analysis of a limited set of WEIRD (Western Educated, Industrialized Rich Democratic) or LOL (Literate, Official and with Lots of users) languages. Including non-WEIRD and non-LOL languages in our psycholinguistic experiments will certainly benefit the cognitive science of language, but also linguistic typology since, as noted, languages certainly do best what speakers do most' but this depends in turn on what our brains do most. We illustrate the benefits of this less biased approach to the cognitive science of language diversity with the consideration of a research project aimed to determine the impact on memory types (declarative, procedural, episodic) of the typological diversity of human languages resulting from sociopolitical factors (or more properly, a potential bidirectional feedback relationship, since changes in memory types can be also expected to impact on structural features of typological interest).