@inproceedings{62ca4bfc30b8461bbce1c4052cdeae84,
title = "Communicative biases shape structures of newly acquired languages",
abstract = "Languages around the world share a number of commonalities known as language universals. We investigate whether the existence of some recurrent patterns can be explained by the learner's preference to balance the amount of information provided by the cues to sentence meaning. In an artificial language learning paradigm, we expose learners to two languages with optional case-marking - one with fixed and one with flexible word order. We find that learners of the flexible word order language, where word order is uninformative of sentence meaning, use significantly more case-marking than the learners of the fixed word order language, where case is a redundant cue. The learning outcomes in our experiment parallel a variety of typological phenomena, providing support for the hypothesis that communicative biases can shape language structures.",
keywords = "efficient communication, Language acquisition, language universals, learning biases",
author = "Maryia Fedzechkina and Jaeger, {T. Florian} and Newport, {Elissa L.}",
note = "Funding Information: We thank T. Stanley and S. Krishnan for their help with data collection and data coding; C. Anzalone and G. Smith for their help with data coding; C. Donatelli, I. Minkina and A. Wood for their help with video stimuli. This work was supported in part by NSF grants BCS-0845059 and IIS-1150028, as well as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship to TFJ, and by NIH grant DC00167 and HD037082 to ELN. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} CogSci 2013.All rights reserved.; 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics, CogSci 2013 ; Conference date: 31-07-2013 Through 03-08-2013",
year = "2013",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics - Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2013",
publisher = "The Cognitive Science Society",
pages = "430--435",
editor = "Markus Knauff and Natalie Sebanz and Michael Pauen and Ipke Wachsmuth",
booktitle = "Cooperative Minds",
}