Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has argued that learners infer word order pat-terns when learning a new language based on knowledge aboutunderlying structure, rather than linear order (Culbertson &Adger, 2014). Specifically, learners prefer typologically com-mon noun phrase word order patterns that transparently reflecthow elements like nouns, adjectives, numerals, and demon-stratives combine hierarchically. We test whether this resultstill holds after removing a potentially confounding strategypresent in the original study design. We find that when learn-ers are taught a naturalistic “foreign” language, a clear prefer-ence for noun phrase word order is replicated but for a subsetof modifier types originally tested. Specifically, participantspreferred noun phrases with the order N-Adj-Dem (as in “mugred this”) over the order N-Dem-Adj (as in “mug this red”).However, they showed no preference between orders N-Adj-Num (as in “mugs red two”) and N-Num-Adj (as in “mugstwo red”). We interpret this sensitivity as potentially reflectingan asymmetry among modifier types in the underlying hierar-chical structure.