Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Across the languages of the world there is a high degree of consistency with respect to the ordering of heads of phrases. Within the generative approach to language these correlational universals have been taken to support the idea of innate linguistic constraints on word order. In contrast, we suggest that the tendency towards word order consistency may emerge from non-linguistic constraints on the leaming of highly structured temporal sequences, of which human languages are prime examples. First, an analysis of recursive consistency within phrase-structure rules is provided, showing how inconsistency may impede leaming. Results are then presented from connectionist simulations involving simple recurrent networks without linguistic biases, demonstrating that recursive inconsistencies directly affect the leamability of a language. Finally, typological language data are presented, suggesting that the word order patterns which are infrequent among the world's languages are the ones which are recursively inconsistent as well as being the patterns which are hard for the nets to learn. We therefore conclude that innate linguistic knowledge may not be necessary to explain word order universals.