The extent to which the linguistic system—its architecture, the representations it operates on,
the constraints it is subject to—is specific to language has broad implications for cognitive …

Abstract Language exhibits striking systematic structure. Words are composed of
combinations of reusable sounds, and those words in turn are combined to form complex …

The study of language typology has played a critical role in revealing potential constraints
on possible linguistic systems. Such constraints, often called “typological universals” have …

A fundamental question for cognitive science concerns the ways in which languages are
shaped by the biases of language learners. Recent research using laboratory language …

Functionalist accounts of language suggest that forms are paired with meanings in ways that
support efficient communication. Previous work on grammatical marking suggests that word …

Our research on statistical language learning shows that infants, young children, and adults
can compute, online and with remarkable speed, how consistently sounds co-occur, how …

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 …

According to classical arguments, language learning is both facilitated and constrained by
cognitive biases. These biases are reflected in linguistic typology—the distribution of …

It is often assumed that cross-linguistically more prevalent distinctions are easier to learn
(Typological Prevalence Hypothesis; TPH). Prior work supports this idea in phonology …

A change to a population's social network is a change to the substrate of cultural
transmission, affecting behavioral diversity and adaptive cultural evolution. While features of …