Culbertson Jennifer, Compostella Arianna, Kirby Simon
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Verona, Verona, Italy.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2025 Jul;78(7):1303-1320. doi: 10.1177/17470218241282404. Epub 2024 Nov 14.
A central goal for psychological science is the explanation of variation in human behaviour. In the domain of language, patterns of cross-linguistic variation have been extensively documented, but there has been vigorous debate over how to explain them. A particularly contentious question is whether constraints on linguistic variation are driven by properties of the human mind that are specific to language or domain-general. In this paper, we present four pattern-learning experiments ( = 306 English- and Italian-speaking adults) across domains (linguistic and nonlinguistic) and modalities (visual, auditory, and tactile) to show that the patterns that are more easily learned are precisely the ones that are found most frequently across languages. This supports a domain-general, cognitive explanation for cross-linguistic variation. However, we suggest that the general/specific dichotomy is ultimately misleading because language structure arises when domain- and modality-general biases meet domain-specific representations.
心理科学的一个核心目标是解释人类行为的变化。在语言领域，跨语言变化的模式已被广泛记录，但对于如何解释这些模式存在激烈的争论。一个特别有争议的问题是，对语言变化的限制是由特定于语言的人类思维属性驱动的，还是由领域通用的属性驱动的。在本文中，我们进行了四项模式学习实验（共306名说英语和意大利语的成年人），涉及不同领域（语言和非语言）和模态（视觉、听觉和触觉），以表明更容易学习的模式恰恰是在各种语言中最常出现的模式。这支持了对跨语言变化的一种领域通用的认知解释。然而，我们认为通用/特定二分法最终会产生误导，因为当领域和模态通用的偏向与领域特定的表征相遇时，语言结构就会出现。
