Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages are subject to many competing pressures, whichoriginate in individual-level learning and communication bi-ases and in social biases reflecting community-level dynamics.Recent work suggests that certain aspects of language struc-ture, such as the cross-linguistic trade-off between case andconstituent-order flexibility, originate in learners’ biases forefficient communication: Learners drop redundant case but re-tain informative case in production. Social biases can lead toretention of redundant case, resulting in systems that requiremore effort to produce. It is not clear, however, whether socialbiases can influence the use of informative cues. We tested thisby exposing participants to a language with uninformative con-stituent order and two dialects, only one of which employedcase. We manipulated the presence of social biases for andagainst the case dialect. Learners biased towards the no-casedialect dropped informative case without compensating for theresulting message uncertainty. Case was retained in all otherconditions.