Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What accounts for the vast diversity in the world’s languages?We explore one possibility: languages adapt to their linguis-tic environment (Linguistic Niche Hypothesis; Lupyan & Dale,2010). Recent studies have found support for this hypothesisthrough correlations between aspects of the environment andlinguistic structure. We synthesize this previous work and findthat languages spoken in cold, small regions tend to be morecomplex across a range of linguistic features. We also testa novel prediction of the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis by ex-amining the learnability of languages for first-language, childlearners.