UC Davis

We report an experiment eliciting ordering preferences for binomial expressions (e.g. bread and butter vs. butter and bread) in order to investigate the respective influences of productive and item-specific knowledge in language processing. Binomial ordering preferences reflect both (i) productive constraints involving phonological, semantic, and lexical properties, and (ii) item-specific relative frequencies. Bayesian and exemplar-based computational models of acquisition and use predict influences of both productive and item-specific knowledge on ordering preferences, with item-specific knowledge playing a smaller role the lower the expression’s overall frequency. Our results confirm this prediction, but also reveal a role of item-specific knowledge even for binomials with overall frequency less than one in ten million. These findings bring a quantitative perspective to the debate over the roles of productive and item-specific knowledge in language.*.